Measure your API Complexity and Reliability

APIs are the new communication interfaces that enable two software applications to talk to each other. These interfaces play a vital role in the functioning of new generation technologies. With the widespread usage of these interfaces, their prominence in technology and business has been dramatically increasing. Failure of these programming interfaces can cause huge economic losses to the business firms as the majority of their services rely on them; it is vital that we understand the complexities of our APIs and exhaustively validate them before deploying. Conformity to the specification and functionality are two major factors that contribute to a successful implementation. Given the wide range of functions performed by these interfaces, a manual validation will be cumbersome and an exhaustive automation process is essential. In this paper, we propose such a framework for conformity and functionality validation. Simple and less complex APIs are easy to adopt and integrate, the ability to quantify those complexities will help us design our interfaces better. Reliability is yet another factor that drives the utilization of these interfaces, lack of proper quantifying methods has made it difficult for both the providers and consumers to perceive it. In this paper, along with the automation framework we present a methodology for measuring the complexity and reliability of APIs. We also present the test metrics of Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and Slack, the prominent public APIs in the domain of collaboration, using our proposed validation framework and methodologies.