Model-driven Testing of RESTful APIs

In contrast to the increasing popularity of REpresentational State Transfer (REST), systematic testing of RESTful Application Programming Interfaces (API) has not attracted much attention so far. This paper describes different aspects of automated testing of RESTful APIs. Later, we focus on functional and security tests, for which we apply a technique called model-based software development. Based on an abstract model of the RESTful API that comprises resources, states and transitions a software generator not only creates the source code of the RESTful API but also creates a large number of test cases that can be immediately used to test the implementation. This paper describes the process of developing a software generator for test cases using state-of-the-art tools and provides an example to show the feasibility of our approach.