Automated Black-Box Testing of RESTful APIs Using Enhanced Artificial Bee Colony

Black box testing of Restful APIs is essential as the API's source code is not always available for public access. Some previous studies focused on automating black box testing; but none of them focused on optimizing the coverage and the size of the test suite. This paper propos es enhancements to the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) swarm intelligence algorithm to be utilized for the automatic generation of test suites for Restful APIs based on Open API Specifications (OAS); whilst maximizing the API test coverage and minimizing the test suite size. Experiments were conducted on eight APIs with varying levels of complexity. The experiments showed that the enhanced ABC is superior to the ABC in terms of the sizes of the generated test suites and their coverage percentages.