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Artificial Bee Colony for Automated Black-Box Testing of RESTful API

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Intelligent Data Engineering and Analytics (FICTA 2023)

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 371))

Abstract

Recently, RESTful APIs are widely utilized in a variety of web applications; developers utilize RESTful APIs as a blacked-out component in micro-services. Black-box testing for RESTful APIs is essential as neither of the API’s source code nor its compiled binary is always available for public access. A handful number of research studies were conducted for the automatic generation of test suite for RESTful APIs based on black-box testing. However, to our knowledge, none of them considered the test coverage criteria or the test suite optimization. This paper proposed adapting the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) swarm intelligence algorithm for the automatic generation of test suites for RESTful APIs based on OpenAPI Specification (OAS), while also maximizing the API test coverage (path, operation, parameter, input value, and status code). Experiments were conducted on six APIs that differ from each other in the number of routes, operation types, input values, and how well the API is documented. The experiments showed that the ABC algorithm can generate test suites that achieve high coverage criteria.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics and Computer Science, The British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt

    Seif Ahmed & Abeer Hamdy

Authors
  1. Seif Ahmed
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  2. Abeer Hamdy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Abeer Hamdy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology (UNSIET), Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University, Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Vikrant Bhateja

  2. Cardiff School of Technologies, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, Warwickshire, UK

    Fiona Carroll

  3. Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    João Manuel R. S. Tavares

  4. Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, Warwickshire, UK

    Sandeep Singh Sengar

  5. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Peter Peer

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Ahmed, S., Hamdy, A. (2023). Artificial Bee Colony for Automated Black-Box Testing of RESTful API. In: Bhateja, V., Carroll, F., Tavares, J.M.R.S., Sengar, S.S., Peer, P. (eds) Intelligent Data Engineering and Analytics. FICTA 2023. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 371. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6706-3_1

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