Welcome to this month’s digest of interesting stories from the software development and QA realms. If you are interested in previous stories, please check out our earlier posts. We hope these news items provide valuable insights for your development and testing efforts.
Blockchain technology is gaining traction across various industries, providing a secure and transparent way to handle transactions and data. QA professionals must adapt their testing strategies to ensure that blockchain applications are robust and secure. This involves testing for data integrity, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues.
By understanding the unique challenges of blockchain technology, QA teams can help ensure the success of blockchain initiatives and maintain trust in these innovative systems.
Modeling applications have assisted programmers in architecting software for years. So it stands to reason the process of API design and development would also benefit from the use of models during the SDLC. StopLight is one such application, offering shops a full visual API modeling suite, including documentation and other useful features.
The best applications used for software development stay out of the way, while making the entire architecting, coding, and testing processes easier. With that said, let’s take a closer look at StopLight to see if it needs to be part of your team’s API tool arsenal.
Like many other innovative technology products – Ruby on Rails comes to mind – StopLight was developed by software engineers wanting a better tool to make their work easier. Company founder Marc MacLeod commented on how the need for a better API tool led to StopLight’s genesis. “I’m an engineer, and StopLight is the solution to problems I faced repeatedly. Before StopLight, best practices were very manual — with no easy way to document and test APIs in an accessible, collaborative setting. StopLight changes this paradigm,” said MacLeod.
StopLight first became available in February of 2016. The designer tool is free to use for singular developers, while team subscriptions are also available – starting at a monthly rate of $8 per person. At those prices, downloading the application to test drive its features and functionality is a smart call for any API shop. The app is available on the Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.
The StopLight application suite includes three main modules. The API Designer is the heart of the tool, providing a way for developers to collaborate on model design leveraging open standards. A documentation module automatically generates API documentation every time the model changes – a boon for public API shops.
Prism Proxy gives developers a way to validate and mock API requests. Users can either install the proxy on a local server, or use StopLight’s Cloud-hosted version for up to 20,000 requests per month. One useful feature provided by Prism Proxy is the ability to reverse engineer an API – simply run traffic through the proxy and StopLight automatically generates endpoint and model definitions.
StopLight’s easy to use API Designer module lets everyone work together on API designs, no matter their level of technical expertise. Even business stakeholders with little to no programming experience are able to use the tool. This is one feature attractive to DevOps and Agile development teams where collaboration and interaction are vital to the success of a project.
Version 2 of StopLight entered a public beta phase in July, with a new module used for testing APIs, including the debugging of HTTP requests. Better collaboration features are also part of the new release. A new pricing model adds flexibility to shops of all sizes.
StopLight is worthy of further exploration for any API development shop. This product continues to garner a lot of buzz in the industry.
Keep coming back to the Betica Blog for additional insights into the world of QA and software development.
Posted on October 21, 2016 | Categories Quality Assurance, Software Development | Tags API Development, Quality Assurance, Software Development, Software Testing, StopLight