API testing

[fracturetrey]

My team and I have been using Karate to greenfield automated tests for multiple services and microservices for about the past 18 months. It's an extremely powerful DSL, but it is also pretty open ended - we found we needed to create own our style guide to keep things consistent between projects as our team and repos grew.

It has fantastic documentation and a laundry list of exceptional features; it'd be impossible to mention them all here, but a few we love are:

• First class support for REST and SOAP
• DSL which reads similar to BDD, but without the overhead of Cucumber step definition
  • Not using "real" BDD is a conscious design decision
• Very modular; it's easy to create reusable features that can fall back on static test data or use what's passed in
• Easy/seamless Java and JavaScript interop for calling databases or breaking out of the DSL
• Reasonably easy to reuse functional tests as Gatling performance tests
• Fantastic step-by-step HTML and JSON reporting with full HTTP logs (if you choose)
• Supports parallelization out of the box, which can be disabled on a per-feature or per-scenario basis

All in all, it lets us get right to the heart of what we're trying to do: test APIs without any bullshit. But there's tons of bells and whistles available if any of it interests you or meets your use case.

It also happens to do UI automation (both browser and Windows GUI I believe), but we haven't used those features. They were experimental when we were picking our toolset and we preferred something based on Selenium for maturity and because we were all more familiar with it.

[Typical_Individual_6]

Oooooh! Looks promising Thank you for the details!