
In industry, RESTful APIs are widely used to build modern Cloud Applications. Testing them is challenging, because not only do they rely on network communications, but also they deal with external services like databases. Therefore, there has been a large amount of research sprout in recent years on how to automatically verify this kind of web services. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art in testing RESTful APIs based on the analysis of 92 scientific articles. These articles were gathered by utilizing search queries formulated around the concept of RESTful API testing on seven popular databases. We eliminated irrelevant articles based on our predefined criteria and conducted a snowballing phase to minimize the possibility of missing any relevant paper. This survey categorizes and summarizes the existing scientific work on testing RESTful APIs and discusses the current challenges in the verification of RESTful APIs. This survey clearly shows an increasing interest among researchers in this field, from 2017 onward. However, there are still a lot of open research challenges to overcome.
Software Engineering (cs.SE), FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Software Engineering
Software Engineering (cs.SE), FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Software Engineering
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 84 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 1% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 1% |
