Guest Blog: Ensuring Your API Quality

Let’s face it – in this API economy, there are a lot of solutions out there for managing, testing, deploying, tracking, and monitoring your APIs. It’s a booming industry and you can see evidence of it all over: large enterprise companies reinventing their message around the concept of microservices and APIs, and the rise of startups whose sole focus is APIs. It’s noisy out there. And you’ve got a business that depends on the quality of your API. So how do you wade through the noise and find the right solution for you? Let’s look at some considerations:

• End-to-end capabilities - One important factor to consider is how comprehensive the solution is. You know that you need to do the basics – test, manage, track, monitor. You can find and implement tools that each do one of those functions and tie them together procedurally. Or you can find a solution that provides all of those capabilities with minimal overhead.
• Try Before Buy - If you’ve been around software development long enough, you’ve seen it happen more than once – a tool sounds great on the website… and the demo was really slick. But when you actually try to use it with your team and your processes, it falls short. Having a free trial period where you can actually use the tool with your own API and your own staff lets you validate that this is the right tool for you.

Even better is having access to open source products, where there’s never a cost involved and you have the ability to contribute to the code base and make it even more applicable to your work environment.

• Affordability - If you can find an open source tool that has the support and features you need, that’s great. Even better is when you find an open source tool that is integrated with the rest of your tool set to provide you with that end-to-end solution we talked about. But if the tool that fits you best is not open source, you should consider how well it fits within your budget. Having affordable options means you can provide licenses for your whole team rather than compromising on how widely you distribute the tools.

Introducing the WSO2 plugin for Ready! API

If you can find a way to put all of this together, you’ve got a very powerful story around your API quality. Now with our new plugin that integrates the open source WSO2 API Manager platform with the affordable Ready! API platform, you can take your API from inception to deployment, knowing that you have fully tested, secured, and managed that important asset. At SmartBear, we are very proud of our partnership with WSO2, a fellow open source vendor and API quality advocate. For more information about the new plugin and how it works, check out the github readme. The plugin can be downloaded and installed from within Ready! API’s Plugin Manager. - Lorinda Brandon,  Technical Evangelist, API Products, SmartBear