Test coverage criteria for RESTful web APIs

Abstract

Web APIs following the REST architectural style (so-called RESTful web APIs) have become the de-facto standard for software inte gration. As RESTful APIs gain momentum, so does the testing of them. However, there is a lack of mechanisms to assess the ade quacy of testing approaches in this context, which makes it difficult to automatically measure and compare their effectiveness. In this paper, we first present a set of ten coverage criteria that allow to determine the degree to which a test suite exercises the different inputs (i.e. requests) and outputs (i.e. responses) of a RESTful API. We then arrange the proposed criteria into eight Test Coverage Levels (TCLs), where TCL0 represents the weakest coverage level and TCL7 represents the strongest one. This enables the automated assessment and comparison of testing techniques according to the overall coverage and TCL achieved by their generated test suites. Our evaluation results on two open-source APIs with real bugs show that the proposed coverage levels nicely correlate with code coverage and fault detection measurements.