Exploring API behaviours through generated examples

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 genera...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Software quality journal Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 729 - 763
Main Authors: Karlsson, Stefan, Hughes, John, Jongeling, Robbert, Čaušević, Adnan, Sundmark, Daniel
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2024
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
API testing
Application programming interface
Automated testing
Behavior
Compilers
Computer Science
Data Structures and Information Theory
Examples
Formal specifications
Interpreters
Operating Systems
Programming Languages
Property-based testing
REST
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Source code
REST
Property-based testing
Examples
Automated testing
API testing
ISSN:0963-9314, 1573-1367, 1573-1367
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:0963-9314
1573-1367
1573-1367
DOI:10.1007/s11219-024-09668-2