Empirical Comparison of Black-box Test Case Generation Tools for RESTful APIs
This provides guidance for developers in selecting testing tools for REST API projects, but it is incremental as it compares existing tools without introducing new methods.
The paper tackled the lack of direct comparisons for automated black-box test case generation tools for RESTful APIs by empirically evaluating four tools on 14 real-world services, finding that RESTler was the most robust with a 100% success rate while RestTestGen achieved the highest test coverage.
In literature, we can find research tools to automatically generate test cases for RESTful APIs, addressing the specificity of this particular programming domain. However, no direct comparison of these tools is available to guide developers in deciding which tool best fits their REST API project. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical comparison of automated black-box test case generation approaches for REST APIs. We surveyed the available black-box testing tools that have been proposed in recent literature, finding four usable prototypes: RestTestGen, RESTler, bBOXRT and RESTest. We used these tools to generate test cases for 14 real-world REST services. Then, testing results have been analyzed and compared in terms of robustness (i.e., success rate) and test coverage. Among the considered tools, RESTler appears to be the most solid, able to successfully test all case studies (the other tools experienced crashes). Conversely, test cases generated by RestTestGen scored the highest coverage, suggesting that its testing strategy is the most effective in testing REST APIs.