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MuleSoft Testing : A Beginner's Guide

MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform™ is the world's leading integration platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs. It provides exceptional business agility to companies by connecting applications, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud with an API-led approach.

Why Is MuleSoft Used?​

  • MuleSoft solution easily automates any workflow and system.
  • It helps to quickly adapt to constant change and business complexity.

Types of API-Led Connectivity​

API Led Connectivity talks about three layers Experience API, Process API and System API. Each layer has its own roles, responsibility and functionality.

System API​

  • It allows you to fetch the raw data from the system of records like JDBC, SAP, Salesforce, AS400 etc.
  • Data fetch from backend systems can be exposed to upstream API securely and reliably.

Process API​

  • It is responsible for orchestrating multiple downstream APIs i.e. collecting data from multiple downstream APIs.
  • Its core functionality is to implement business logic, data aggregation, routing etc.

Experience API​

  • It's a user-facing API and can be used by different mediums like mobile applications, web applications, or any other channels.
  • These APIs are channel-specific which means if you are developing a mobile application then it can consume mobile API or if you are developing a web application can consume web API.

Test Approach​

Here are some of the key API testing approaches:

Understand API requirements​

  • Understand the different types of authorization methods.
  • Understand each API purpose.
  • Develop an understanding of the application and usage of each API in these workflows.

Test Environment​

  • Prepare the test environment.
  • Access to the MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform™.
  • Access to the test application to generate test data.
  • Make sure to build a mechanism to roll back the environment, since with API testing you will be generating huge data and sometimes negative testing can lead to unforeseen behaviour of the application.

Test Data​

  • Prepare the test data for API testing.
  • Keep a golden copy of your data set.

Outcome of each API​

  • Status code of each API.
  • Verify response with positive data set.
  • Verify response with negative data set.

Focus on Functional API​

  • Generally, avoid testing more than one API in a test case, but in some cases for end-to-end testing flow, you have to use some of the APIs in a sequence to perform complete flow.
  • Verify data changes in all end-to-end systems.

Organize API endpoints​

  • Group your tests in such a way that you can find API easily. In many cases, you will also see that developers do the same way of categorisation to easily identify them.
  • Grouping or categorisation also helps you in understanding or analysing test coverage.
  • Example: https://petstore.swagger.io/

Automate APIs​

  • Prioritize the test cases
  • Identify the automation tool
  • Schedule your API test execution with CI tools
  • Generate Reports and Logs

What Do You Think?​

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