Exploring API behaviours through generated examples
Journal article, 2024

Understanding the behaviour of a system's API can be hard. Giving users access to relevant examples of how an API behaves has been shown to make this easier for them. In addition, such examples can be used to verify expected behaviour or identify unwanted behaviours. Methods for automatically generating examples have existed for a long time. However, state-of-the-art methods rely on either white-box information, such as source code, or on formal specifications of the system behaviour. But what if you do not have access to either? This may be the case, for example, when interacting with a third-party API. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically generate relevant examples of behaviours of an API, without requiring either source code or a formal specification of behaviour. Evaluation on an industry-grade REST API shows that our method can produce small and relevant examples that can help engineers to understand the system under exploration.

Property-based testing

API testing

Automated testing

REST

Examples

Author

Stefan Karlsson

Mälardalens högskola

ABB E-mobility AB

John Hughes

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Functional Programming

Robbert Jongeling

Mälardalens högskola

Adnan Causevic

ABB E-mobility AB

Daniel Sundmark

Mälardalens högskola

Software Quality Journal

0963-9314 (ISSN) 1573-1367 (eISSN)

Vol. 32 2 729-763

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

Computer Science

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1007/s11219-024-09668-2

More information

Latest update

8/15/2024