API’s have become the backbone of modern digital ecosystems, enabling seamless integration and interaction between diverse systems, applications, and services. Organizations increasingly rely on APIs to deliver robust functionality, enhance user experiences, and drive operational efficiency. Additionally, APIs are playing an even greater role in the future of AI-driven systems. The new wave of AI-readiness and agent consumers has fueled a dramatic 800% increase in AI-related API creation, further reinforcing the importance of designing structured, interoperable, and AI-ready APIs.
However, as the dependency on APIs grows, so does the importance of ensuring their quality. API quality directly impacts security, reliability, and both the human developer and agent experiences (often referred to as Developer Experience and Agent Experience). Poorly tested APIs not only expose organizations to security vulnerabilities but can also lead to functional failures, service disruptions, and diminished user satisfaction. Any or all of these have severe implications for both API producers and their consumers and impact both reputation and profits.
SmartBear has been bringing best of breed tools across our API portfolio together. Today, we’re pleased to introduce the newest capability, API Hub for Test, an integrated functional and automation test capability within the SmartBear API Hub empowering teams to deliver API quality throughout the entire lifecycle.
Figure 1 – SmartBear API Hub now including Test capabilities
The Importance of API Quality
As APIs increasingly become central to digital transformation and AI integration strategies, the stakes associated with API quality rise significantly. More than 60% of technology professionals estimate downtime costs their organizations at least $100,000 per hour, with one-third indicating costs up to $500,000 hourly. As APIs proliferate, such financial risks underscore the importance of thorough API testing practices to proactively identify and mitigate potential failures.
API security concerns also remain a persistent issue. The latest OWASP API Security Top 10 report highlights prevalent vulnerabilities such as Broken Object Level Authorization and Broken User Authentication, emphasizing the need for rigorous testing to prevent costly data breaches and unauthorized access incidents.
Another pressing issue is API drift – the misalignment between API documentation or specifications artifacts and the actual implementation. This is often exacerbated by the fact that the longest part of an API’s lifecycle is in ‘production’, meaning that change is very likely and often necessary. If the processes are not in place to ensure tests continuously evolve in lockstep with the design, then drift becomes a very real problem. A recent industry analysis of over 650 million API calls found that 75% of production APIs deviate from their published OpenAPI Specifications. This drift can significantly disrupt integrations, degrade functionality, and expose vulnerabilities, further highlighting the necessity for continuous and integrated testing strategies.
These challenges are front and center for us at SmartBear as we continue on our journey in providing a cohesive API ecosystem, integrating API cataloging, exploration, contract testing, gateway-agnostic API portal and now improved test capabilities. This integrated approach ensures testing practices remain consistently aligned with evolving API designs, effectively mitigating API drift, on the provider side through functional testing, and on the consumer side through contract testing, we ensure APIs remain reliable, secure, and performant all while improving collaboration and team workflows.
Figure 2 – SmartBear API Hub – an open-core approach to API Enablement
Introducing API Hub for Test
API Hub for Test, built within the SmartBear API Hub, unifies API design, governance, testing, and documentation. This cohesive experience helps to eliminate traditional silos between architecture, development, and QA teams, streamlining collaboration and enhancing productivity.
QA teams benefit significantly by initiating testing directly from accurate, up-to-date API design artifacts (e.g., an OpenAPI Document), thus minimizing the risks of test drift and unnecessary rework. The test feature in API Hub supports modern agile and hybrid teams by providing intuitive low-code/no-code testing capabilities, facilitating real-time collaboration between QA and developers. Its ease of use reduces the need to have highly technical automation engineers and allows manual testers to gain the time saving benefits associated with automation.
Whether you’re just getting started with APIs, or have a large API portfolio, our new capability simplifies functional, regression, and integration testing through built-in assertions, reusable testing assets, and seamless integration into continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. Designed to scale effortlessly with organizational needs, supporting both sequential and parallel execution, and comes with a host of integrations with the broader set of tools used by teams such as GitHub, Jira, and Slack.
By integrating directly into existing workflows, API Hub for Test positions itself as the ideal solution for modern teams seeking clarity, speed, and alignment throughout the API testing process.
Getting Started with API Hub for Test
To demonstrate the value of an integrated testing experience, let’s take a practical walkthrough:
- Start with the API Catalog: Access the OpenAPI description for our sample Payees API. Progress towards a design candidate, guided by standardization and governance checks.
- Manual Exploration: Use the exploration capability to manually explore the API’s surface area, gaining a solid understanding of its functionality.
- Automatic Test Case Creation: Transition to the new test feature to automatically generate test cases by importing the OpenAPI description directly from the API catalog.
- Test Case Setup: Create test cases covering the three primary API endpoints, configure assertions for expected status codes, and chain requests using variable injection.
- Create a Smoke Test Suite: Assemble a smoke test suite utilizing the created test cases. Configure email and Slack notifications to alert you of any test failures.
- Local Code Testing: Employ a local tunnel to execute the smoke test against code running locally. Override environment parameters to point to a locally running Azure function, ensuring robust testing across both cloud and local environments.
You can follow along using your API Hub subscription or get setup with a free trial in just a few clicks.
Step 1. Navigate to API within the API Catalog
Figure 3 – Navigating and reviewing OpenAPI with governance markers
We begin by opening our API Catalog (within API Hub for Design) and navigating to our sample Payees API. From here, we open the OpenAPI description and begin working toward a design candidate (or review and familiarize ourselves with the capabilities offered by the API). Standardization and governance checks are automatically applied to ensure consistency and compliance.
Step 2. Manual Exploration
Figure 4 – Using Explore to interact with API endpoints
Next, we use the explore capability to interactively discover the API’s surface area. This helps us build a deeper understanding of its behavior and verify assumptions about request/response patterns.
Step 3. Automate Test Creation from OpenAPI
Figure 5 – Importing OpenAPI from catalog and previewing test cases
With the OpenAPI description in place, we launch API Hub for Test and import the spec directly from the Catalog. This automatically generates a baseline set of test cases aligned to the API endpoints.
Step 4. Test Case Setup
Figure 6 – Setting assertions and chaining requests visually
Once we have the base test case created directly from our OpenAPI description, we can then configure our tests – adding assertions for expected status codes, chaining requests using variable injection, and customizing payloads. This ensures meaningful, repeatable coverage of each endpoint. Here we create test cases covering the three primary API endpoints, configure assertions for expected status codes, and chain requests using variable injection. There’s a whole raft of features within the test case creation, check out the docs for more details.
Step 5. Create a Test Suite to Smoke Test our API
Figure 7 – Creating a test suite and configuring alerts
We can build up a test suite, which can consist of one or more tests. In our example we leverage the test suite to act as a smoke test and add notifications via email and Slack to keep stakeholders informed of failures.
Step 6. Local Code Testing
Figure 8 – Setting up local tunnel and environment overrides
Finally, we validate against a local instance of our service by enabling a secure local tunnel and overriding the environment configuration to point to a locally hosted Azure function. This gives us the flexibility to validate changes before deployment.
Being able to run a complete smoke test suite against locally running code prior to pushing to a shared or dedicated test environment brings measurable productivity gains. Developers get rapid feedback loops, reducing time spent debugging in later stages and helping to catch issues closer to the source. This also supports more agile, iterative development workflows by minimizing context switching and tightening the dev-test cycle.
API Success Has Quality at its Core
When the average cost of API-related downtime can easily exceed $100,000 per hour – and in many cases, soar past $500,000 – investing in robust, integrated quality practices is more than a safeguard. It’s a strategic advantage. Quality-focused capabilities like API Hub for Test don’t just reduce risk; they return time, confidence, and cost savings to teams under pressure to deliver more, faster.
API Hub for Test represents more than just a new test feature – it’s a critical extension of SmartBear’s vision for a truly unified API lifecycle. By embedding both contract and functional testing capabilities directly into the design and exploration phases, we’re reducing friction, eliminating silos through collaboration and context sharing, and ultimately empowering teams to build better APIs faster.
Teams can now navigate from design to functional validation all within the context of API Hub, significantly shortening feedback loops and minimizing rework. Whether you’re testing deployed services or validating code running locally, the test feature gives you the flexibility, scale, and automation you need without introducing unnecessary overhead.
What’s more, these capabilities are not standalone – they’re embedded into the broader API Hub experience, integrating smoothly with cataloging, governance, exploration, contract testing, documenting within our developer portal feature, and even our robust ReadyAPI on-premise suite. For modern teams working in fast-paced, hybrid environments, this integrated model ensures clarity, consistency, and collaboration at every stage. It’s still sufficiently modular and you’re not locked into using API Hub for all capabilities, you have the flexibility to integrate with other technology choices at your disposal.
As we continue to evolve the SmartBear API Hub, testing will remain central to our mission of delivering the most complete, developer- and QA-friendly API development experience on the market. We’re just getting started and will continue to deliver developer-based tools focused on delivering quality throughout the SDLC which foster communication between teams – the future of API quality is already taking shape!
It’s an exciting time ahead in the API space, come journey with us – we can’t wait to see what you build!