[This post previously appeared on the API Connect Test and Monitor Blog]
I was fortunate to get a chance to present about how inspecting what you expect is important both in the military and with APIs at the Nordic APIs Austin API summit. If you’d like to check out the slides or the video of the presentation you can do so.
This lesson is crucial both in my past life as a US Marine and in my present life as an Offering (Product) Manager at IBM on API Connect Test and Monitor
Why?
In software, we always have a user that we are serving. Our software exists to do some job for that user. We expect that the software we’ve created will do that job effectively for that user, that it will make their life easier or more effective and that it will not make their life harder.
At API Connect our why is to create software that allows API providers to make their APIs secure and open so that their developers and customers can build on their creations and unleash their own value for the world.
As we see the world there are two kinds of people: API Providers and API Consumers. Those API Consumers are the people our customers, the API Providers exist to serve.One of my specialties is in API Connect Test and monitor. This is software that helps API Providers see the world the way their API Consumers do.
API Connect Test and monitor allows them to simply call an existing API from their cloud account, get a response and from that automatically generate a test with no code. They can then edit that test visually or in code and can publish it and set it to run on demand with deep, detailed output on their API quality. They can further set that test to run as frequently as they need to in order to understand how their own APIs look to their consumers. They can test the success and failure conditions, the latency and the detailed expectations of the payload of a response.
They can truly inspect what they expect from their APIs.