Day 1 - API Testing vs. UI Testing

Hi Team,

I am currently working on test automation within the public sector to bring citizens and government closer together and facilitate communication between them.

API testing was a must and ReadyAPI quickly prooved to be the most promising tool (and it delivered! :smileyhappy:). For UI automatision I also reviewed TestComplete, but at that time (2 years ago) we decided not to go with this tool. Reasons: I couldn't get it up and running that easily (I rememeber recording an easy script and couldn't get it to run it again), but most importantly because there was/is some in-house knowledge on the (free) Selenium framework. So we still use this framework for UI testing to complement the API testing.

However; choice for me personally is API testing, seeing it enables a shift to left in testing and helps to deliver quality even before a front end comes into play. UI automation for me now is mostly pure front (cross-)browser related tests, like logging in/out, check hyperlinks, sorting, filtering, etc.) and serves more as a regression test, while the API testing really covers the most part of the functionality (positive, negative testing, performance, security, authorization, authentication, flowtesting, destructuve, concurrenty, ...) + trying to cover new features each sprint.

...so GO API team :smileywink: