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API Testing Tool

Automate Codeless API Testing With Parasoft SOAtest

Fulfill your API testing needs, from simple to complex, all without scripting.

Parasoft SOAtest Is the Leading Enterprise API Testing Tool

Select the industry-leading, one-stop shop for your complete functional testing needs, from REST & SOAP APIs and web services, to microservices, databases, and more. Parasoft SOAtest automates API testing by providing advanced test creation capabilities that leverage AI and machine learning to process service definitions and recorded traffic, produce maintainable and reusable test assets, and enable continuous functional and load testing.

How Does It Work?

Parasoft SOAtest’s API testing solution is widely recognized as best-in-class, with innovative tooling and broad support for over 120 message formats and protocols. With visual drag-and-drop tooling, users can create the most complex test scenarios without having to write a single line of code because things like test flow logic, complex assertions, looping, data driving, and keyword association, such as BDD with Cucumber, can all be easily built with minimal technical experience.

Leverage your manual testing to create scriptless, automated RESTful API tests

Creating RESTful API tests has never been easier. SOAtest’s integrated SMART API Test Generator analyzes API traffic from a source such as the Parasoft Recorder plugin for Chrome and converts the behind-the-scenes API behavior into meaningful API test scenarios. To go beyond simple record and playback, SOAtest applies artificial intelligence to understand and extract the correlation between API requests and responses, building reusable, dynamic, extendable, and impactful tests. These tests are displayed in the Parasoft SOAtest tool’s Test Case Explorer window as scriptless automated API tests, where they can be reviewed and edited.

But it doesn’t just stop at API interfaces. SOAtest is a complete omni-channel testing solution that can also test systems like databases, ESBs, mainframes, and mobile devices, with integrations for your existing software development ecosystem, including test frameworks (such as Cucumber, BDD, TDD, Selenium, and Appium) and CI infrastructures, all within the same user interface.

Users can comfortably traverse complete end-to-end test scenarios right within one test case inside SOAtest, to comprehensively validate the complete user experience. All tests created in SOAtest can then be leveraged for reuse to be run as security and performance tests, to efficiently validate nonfunctional requirements for early-stage testing.

Acceleration to support true continuous testing

On top of all of this is rich support for continuous testing. Through SOAtest’s tight integration with existing CI/CD systems (i.e. Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, Azure DevOps) and Parasoft’s virtualization tool, tests can be executed on demand to accelerate the feedback process required from agile development methodologies. Results from testing provide meaningful and actionable tasks in SOAtest’s rich and dynamic reporting system that can take the form of a simple PDF report to a dynamic multilevel HTML document outlining which tests were executed, what the status was, and to which requirements they were associated, allowing multiple stakeholders to understand the health of their critical applications.

Parasoft DTP’s centralized reporting and analytics dashboard correlates functional and nonfunctional test results with the underlying API and code coverage, so stakeholders can pinpoint risky functionality that needs to be tested, with a holistic view of the entire software development process.

Features

Users can create end-to-end test scenarios that span APIs, web services, databases, and the UI layer. From a single intuitive interface, Parasoft SOAtest automatically creates functional tests based on various service definition formats including OpenAPI/Swagger, RAML, WADL, and WSDL/XSD. A test is created for each operation, which can then be chained into functional testing scenarios and data driven with external data sources to thoroughly cover requirements and use cases.

Parasoft SOAtest has the broadest support for transports and message formats in the industry, along with an extension framework that makes it easy for users to add their own custom message formats or transport protocols. The extensive protocol support includes:

  • SOAP/XML, REST/JSON, GraphQL
  • HTTP(S), TCP/IP, JMS, MQ, Microsoft .NET WCF
  • Microservice and IoT standards like gRPC, Kafka, AMQP, RabbitMQ, WebSocket, MQTT
  • Custom message formats like Cobol copybook, ISO 8583, Fixed Length, EDI, FIX, HL7, Swift
  • Many more. For a full list, click here.

Unlike other API testing tools, the award-winning SOAtest supports embedding test flow logic into your test scenarios, enabling complex test flows without complex scripting to support actions like looping, wait conditions, error recovery, or conditional data-driving of test scenarios.

In addition to visually creating tests, Parasoft’s award-winning API testing tool provides a REST API that enables users to create, modify, and execute tests programmatically.

SOAtest automatically creates functional tests from recorded traffic, which can be imported from various sources or recorded through a message proxy. API calls from an application’s web interface can be captured directly by the Parasoft Recorder in the Chrome web browser, which SOAtest’s SMART API Test Generator uses to build tests, leveraging advanced heuristics and artificial intelligence to generate meaningful and complex test scenarios that are imported into the testing workspace.

Machine learning is employed to learn about the underlying business logic from any test in your test library, enabling SOAtest to intelligently create or update any of your test assets in exact accordance with how your business has decided to test that API.

As your API testing strategy scales, your libraries of test cases will grow, and when the APIs being tested change, your tests will need to be updated. Ordinarily this causes a significant barrier to scaling your test automation strategy, but with SOAtest, you can manage change in an automated way. Easily configure Parasoft SOAtest’s Change Advisor to automatically scan API interfaces, identify changes in the services, and then create a template that shows you how the test assets are impacted by those changes and automatically updates the tests to reflect the changes.

Executing your complete test suite for every incremental build is very time consuming and becomes a bottleneck in your CI/CD pipeline. Instead of executing all the tests to verify the quality of a build, SOAtest optimizes your API test suite to execute only the tests necessary to validate the changes between builds. Within its Smart Test Execution capabilities, Parasoft SOAtest uses Test Impact Analysis to optimize the set of tests to be executed so you can get quicker feedback from the CI/CD pipeline.

SOAtest test suites are referenceable by other test scenarios. If multiple test cases rely on specific functionality that is changing, that portion can be made a reference, modified in one location, and the changes will propagate to the rest of the test cases.

To keep track of all these changes, Parasoft fully supports versioning by storing all relevant data as comparable files that are compatible with standard version control systems.

Execute your tests and view results within the context of the test environment, while controlling the behavior of constrained dependencies to ensure predictability, leveraging service virtualization. For deployment across the enterprise, Parasoft CTP’s thin client interface enables test creation and test orchestration without users having to install testing software on their desktop.

From there, Parasoft provides everything you need to orchestrate tests, including test data management. To ensure your test data is manageable and always available, SOAtest’s data repository enables the dynamic construction of hierarchical messages for API tests.

CTP’s web interface also enables test environment management. Your entire library of test cases becomes available whenever it comes time to diagram a test flow. Test cases can simply be connected to components with SOAtest’s easy-to-use visual diagramming, and when the environment is provisioned, those test cases will execute to make test orchestration a reality. These environments can be augmented with virtual services and deployed as a part of your CI/CD pipeline.

Gain insights into your application’s test coverage with traceability workflows. Import requirements from the build system to map the associated test cases to those requirements. Managers get visibility to which requirements may not have complete test coverage. With user stories correlated to test cases, which are also aligned to the code, Parasoft SOAtest identifies which tests to run when changes are made to the code and reports on what requirements are impacted.

SOAtest’s event monitoring framework enables end-to-end validation of test scenarios with visibility into messages as they flow through ESBs, Java applications, databases, and other backend systems as you invoke the service APIs.

SOAtest collects REST and SOAP API coverage as part of test execution, reporting which tests cases are covering which parts of the service interface and which parts have missing or incomplete test coverage. SOAtest can also be integrated with Parasoft Jtest or Parasoft dotTEST to collect underlying code coverage information as the API tests are executed, delivering a holistic picture and complete traceability of how the application is tested.

Benefit From the Parasoft Approach

Achieve High Levels of Test Automation Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

Many organizations struggle to achieve high levels of API test automation. Comprehensive test coverage of the APIs requires not only knowledge of how the API is designed but also how it is used. SOAtest’s Smart API Test Generator captures the interactions of your application with the underlying APIs and applies AI and machine learning heuristics to identify patterns and relationships in the data to automatically construct real API test scenarios.

Make Continuous Testing a Reality

Continuous testing isn’t just about having automated tests — the tests also need to be executed continuously and provide continuous feedback into your software delivery pipeline. With powerful CI/CD plugins and the ability to reuse API tests for load and performance testing while tightly integrating with service virtualization, Parasoft enables continuous testing to become a reality so your test automation can run anytime, anywhere.

Easily Manage API Change

APIs change, and with the adoption of microservices, these changes become even more frequent. When change happens, you need a way to efficiently update your test suites to bring them into alignment. Parasoft SOAtest’s Change Advisor streamlines this process, reducing the burden of maintaining and refactoring your test suites.