API Test Generation from OpenAPI

Lightspeed Commerce is a provider of cloud-based point-of-sale payment technology that pursues an API-first approach to tailoring its services to clients that range from golf courses to pet supplies retailer. Lightspeed’s hospitality unit, however, struggled with a lack of consistent API tooling, standards, and processes across its development teams.

The Lightspeed team deployed the Collections product from Postman to internal, partner, and public APIs to organize and distribute its internal, partner, and public APIs, creating a single source of truth. This reduced onboarding time for engineers by 20% while also improving quality assurance. Postman Collections give the team’s product manager immediate visibility into changes in real time, enabling testers and the product manager to independently validate new functionality against product specifications. The result: a 30% reduction in the time it takes to test and validate new API functionality, according to a Postman case study.

William Hill plc, one of the UK’s leading bookmakers with more than 2,300 betting parlors, sought test script suites for APIs and middleware components to replace a manual process that often forced the team to spend extra time clarifying initial requirements and to start test creation from scratch with each new software project. The company deployed SmartBear’s ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance tools to provide full scope, test, development and integration coverage all the way to software delivery, making it easy to reuse test code and scripts. The results include cutting the time required to develop new software by weeks, improved collaboration among teams in different locations, and improved capacity to fix issues as they arise, according to a SmartBear case study.

As businesses increasingly rely on software that interacts through APIs, the demand for API testing solutions has escalated and AI-powered tools are “offering substantial improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and cost- effectiveness,” says Market.us in a December 2024 report. The market research firm estimates worldwide spending on API testing tools will increase from $1.5 billion in 2023 to $12.4 billion by 2033, an annual growth rate of 23.5% from 2024-2033.