This area of the API life cycle is focused on the streamlining, documenting, and automating the testing of the underlying contract for each API. It is about understanding the overall performance of the API and its integration and running other types of tests. Testing should include automation to properly scrutinize the entire surface area of each API, as well as the operations surrounding it, helping teams do more work and consistently contribute to the quality of all APIs.
While there are always specific nuances to testing an API, the majority of testing can be realized with these common elements. A consistent approach to testing across all APIs helps ensure quality and provides a consistent template for what testing is, allowing it to be governed across all teams. Standardizing how teams test APIs is essential to achieving the reliability you will need across the thousands of APIs you will use to do business in the future.
