What happens when you don't test APIs for security and performance?

1 Security breaches

One of the worst consequences of not testing APIs for security is exposing your application and your users to malicious attacks. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in your API endpoints, such as injection, broken authentication, misconfiguration, or insufficient encryption, to access sensitive data, execute unauthorized commands, or compromise your system. For example, in 2018, Facebook suffered a massive data breach that affected 50 million users, due to a flaw in its API that allowed attackers to obtain access tokens and impersonate users. Not only can such incidents damage your reputation and trust, but they can also result in legal penalties, fines, or lawsuits.

2 Performance issues

Another consequence of not testing APIs for performance is affecting your application's functionality and user experience. Performance testing helps you measure how your API responds to different levels of load, latency, concurrency, and throughput, and identify any bottlenecks, errors, or failures. Without performance testing, your API may not be able to handle the expected or unexpected traffic, resulting in slow response times, timeouts, or crashes. For example, in 2017, Amazon's S3 service experienced a major outage that affected many websites and services that relied on its API, due to a human error that triggered a cascade of failures. Not only can such incidents cause frustration and dissatisfaction among your users, but they can also result in lost revenue, opportunities, or customers.

3 Quality assurance best practices

To avoid the negative impacts of not testing APIs for security and performance, you need to follow some quality assurance best practices. First, you need to define clear and consistent requirements and specifications for your API, such as the expected inputs, outputs, formats, protocols, and standards. Second, you need to design and execute comprehensive and automated test cases for your API, covering both functional and non-functional aspects, such as functionality, security, performance, reliability, usability, and compatibility. Third, you need to use appropriate tools and frameworks for your API testing, such as Postman, SoapUI, JMeter, or RestAssured, that can help you simulate different scenarios, generate test data, validate results, and report issues. Fourth, you need to monitor and analyze your API's performance and security regularly, using tools such as New Relic, Datadog, or Apigee, that can help you track metrics, identify trends, detect anomalies, and optimize your API.

By testing your APIs for security and performance, you can ensure that your application delivers the value and quality that your users expect and deserve. You can also prevent costly and damaging incidents that can jeopardize your business and reputation. Testing APIs is not an optional or trivial task, but a vital and integral part of your quality assurance process.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?