4 Best Web Services Automation Testing Tools (2024)

Web Services are the services that are available over the web or that enables communication between the application and the web. These services are responsible for providing a protocol for communication of standard quality. The major advantage of web services is that it allows the exchange of data/information between two applications working on different platforms.

Types of Web Services

Below are the types of web services:

SOAP

SOAP stands for Simple Objective Access Protocol. This protocol was designed to ease the communication between programs written on a different platform and programming languages.

REST

This framework was designed to allow working with components like media, files and objects on hardware devices.

What is the Testing Process of Web Services/APIs?

Here is the testing process of web services/APIs:

1. Specifications Review: At this stage, the specifications of the API are reviewed from the test perspective.

2. Test Specifications Development: Here, based on the specifications test conditions are determined with their expected results.

3. Test Framework Development: The testing team choose a framework like SoapUI, Postman or develop its own set of static resources.

4. Test Case Development: At this stage, the test conditions determined earlier are implemented into test cases with the help of coding. It involves creating sanity test suites, surveillance test suites.

5. Test Execution and Reporting: At last, the created test cases are executed and a report is generated for further analysis and improvements.

Challenges in Web Services Testing

Below are the challenges in web services testing:

1. The first challenge in API testing is developing its initial setup.

2. Technologies are developing at a very fast rate so sometimes it gets very difficult to keep the testing strategy updated as per the current testing need to effectively test the systems.

3. It is also difficult to test the combinations of parameters used for testing.

4. Another challenge in testing is determining the accurate sequence for API calls.

5. It is necessary to validate the testing parameters at regular interval of time.

Web Services Automation Testing Tools

Various web services automation testing tools are given below:

1. SoapUI

SoapUI is an open-source tool used by developers and testers to increase the delivery rate of their REST and SOAP APIs. The pro version of SoapUI is known as ReadyAPI. It helps in integrating automated API into the delivery pipeline with the aid of next-generation tools. Its Resource Center help beginners to get started with API testing.

Features

1. SoapUI helps in performing API functional testing to make sure that the web service is functioning as intended.

2. This tool tests the performance of a web service by executing a load test on it with the help of virtual users.

3. It can also help in ensuring the security of the third-party APIs, public APIs, or vulnerable internal APIs.

4. The user if this tool can save his time and money by virtualizing the resources a properly built API may use from the business.

5. Test coverage and speed can be increased with the aid of data-driven testing.

6. A detailed testing report is provided by it to improve the testing and analyze the results.

2. Postman

Postman is another tool for automating web services testing by integrating it into the CI/CD pipeline. With the help of automated tests, it is possible to perform the same created test suites again and again without any chance of human error. With Postman you can perform unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, end to end tests, regression tests, mock tests on your API.

Features

By integrating created test suites into the CI/CD pipeline it is possible to execute it on every new push to the API. Postman allows integration of Jenkins for creating your CI/CD pipeline. It helps in ensuring the sanity of the development code. Automated testing with the command line tools, Postman and Newman, users can reduce the risks of breakage by increasing the coverage and rate of testing to develop a robust and bug resistant program.

Web services automation testing leads to less expense on QA, less lag between development and QA, along with that it also reduces the bug removal time.

3. JMeter

JMeter is an Apache product that can be used as web services automation testing tool. It is a Java application and can execute the load test, check the functionality of the system and measure its performance. The performance of both the static and dynamic resources can be tested with JMeter. It is possible to simulate a heavy load on a server, group of servers, network or object. It helps in evaluating its ability to perform under various locations ad conditions that might exist in the real operating scenario.

Features

1. Different applications, servers, protocols it can test are:

• Web – HTTP, HTTPS
• SOAP or REST web services
• Databases via JDBC
• And many more

2. The JMeter IDE is fully featured to allow fast recording, building and debugging of test plans.

3. It is possible to perform a load test from any Java-compatible OS like Linux, Windows, etc using Command-line mode.

4. It provides a dynamic HTML test report that is ready to present.

5. Test results can be cached and analysed while being offline.

4. Katalon

Katalon is another tool used to automate Web, API, mobile and desktop tests that can be deployed on operating systems like Windows, macOS, Linux.

Features

1. Codeless service is available to help beginners with less or no testing experience.

2. This platform is used by more than 65k companies from over 160 countries. It has hundreds of repositories and offers online courses to help testers.

3. The Katalon’s IDE is productive enough to help the easy creation of automated tests. Tests can be generated for any OS or platform, no matter how complex the application is.

4. Testers can also use built-in project templates, test case libraries, keywords and object repositories for a quick start.

5. It can be used to perform all kinds of end to end testing.

6. It is easy to locate, detect and store object which makes the scripting process fast.

7. All the UI elements can be automatically stored to maximize reusability.

Conclusion

Automating web services testing is the need of the current development world. Since automation does not require continuous human presence, so it makes test more time and efforts efficient. It allows performing those test which is not possible to execute earlier because of human limitations to perform repeated tasks again.