Automation of Integration Testing of RESTful Hypermedia Systems: A Model-driven Approach

摘要

The proper design of Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs is not trivial because developers have to deal with a flood of recommendations and best practices, especially the proper application of the hypermedia constraint requires some decent experience. Furthermore, testing RESTful APIs is a missing topic within literature. Especially hypermedia testing is not mentioned at all. Manual hypermedia testing is time-consuming and hard to maintain. Testing a hypermedia API requires many test cases that have similar structure, especially when different user roles and error cases are considered. In order to tackle this problem, we proposed a Model-driven Testing (MDT) approach for hypermedia systems using the metamodel within our existing Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach. This work discusses challenges and results of hypermedia testing for RESTful APIs using MDT techniques that were discovered within our research. MDT allows white-box testing, hence covering complete program structure and behavior of the generated application. By doing this, we are able to achieve a high automated test coverage. Moreover, any runtime behavior deviated from the metamodel reveals bugs within the generators.