Behavior-Driven REST (An API Case Study)

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

A client once asked me to take a team that was new to REST, Agile, etc. and put together a high profile, high value commerce-oriented API in the period of six months. In the process of training the team and designing this API, I hit upon the idea of providing rich testing
coverage by mixing the Behavior-Driven Design testing approach with REST.

In this talk, I will walk you through the idea, the process, and the remarkable outcomes we achieved. I will show you how you can benefit as well from this increasingly useful testing strategy. The approach makes it easy to produce tests that are accessible to business analysts and other stakeholders who wouldn't understand the first
thing about more conventional unit tests.

Behavior is expressed using natural language. The consistent API style minimizes the upfront work in defining step definitions. In the end, \you can produce sophisticated coverage, smoke tests, and more that exercise the full functionality of the API. It also produces another organizational artifact that can be used in the future to migrate to
other implementation technologies.

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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