Log-based, Business-aware REST API Testing
Ding Yang, Ruixiang Qian, Zhao Wei, Zhenyu Chen, Chunrong Fang

TL;DR
LoBREST is a log-based, business-aware REST API testing method that leverages historical logs and business constraints to improve testing effectiveness, outperforming existing tools in coverage and bug detection.
Contribution
This paper introduces LoBREST, a novel approach that uses historical request logs and business constraints for more effective REST API testing of complex functionalities.
Findings
LoBREST achieved top operation coverage on 16 out of 17 services.
LoBREST detected 108 5XX bugs, including 38 unique to it.
LoBREST outperformed eight existing tools in coverage and bug detection.
Abstract
REST APIs enable collaboration among microservices. A single fault in a REST API can bring down the entire microservice system and cause significant financial losses, underscoring the importance of REST API testing. Effectively testing REST APIs requires thoroughly exercising the functionalities behind them. To this end, existing techniques leverage REST specifications (e.g., Swagger or OpenAPI) to generate test cases. Using the resource constraints extracted from specifications, these techniques work well for testing simple, business-insensitive functionalities, such as resource creation, retrieval, update, and deletion. However, for complex, business-sensitive functionalities, these specification-based techniques often fall short, since exercising such functionalities requires additional business constraints that are typically absent from REST specifications. In this paper, we present…
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