Automated Generation of Realistic Test Inputs for Web APIs

Testing web APIs automatically requires generating input data values such as addressess, coordinates or country codes. Generating meaningful values for these types of parameters randomly is rarely feasible, which means a major obstacle for current test case generation approaches. In this paper, we present ARTE, the first semantic-based approach for the Automated generation of Realistic TEst inputs for web APIs. Specifically, ARTE leverages the specification of the API under test to extract semantically related values for every parameter by applying knowledge extraction techniques. Our approach has been integrated into RESTest, a state-of-the-art tool for API testing, achieving an unprecedented level of automation which allows to generate up to 100\% more valid API calls than existing fuzzing techniques (30\% on average). Evaluation results on a set of 26 real-world APIs show that ARTE can generate realistic inputs for 7 out of every 10 parameters, outperforming the results obtained by related approaches.