Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications often integrate various third-party healthcare applications and medical devices through REST APIs, resulting in complex and interdependent networks of REST APIs. Oslo City’s healthcare department collaborates with various industry partners to develop these applications, enriched with diverse REST APIs that evolve during the DevOps process to accommodate evolving needs such as new features, services, and devices. Oslo City’s primary goal is to utilize automated solutions for continuous testing of REST APIs at each evolution stage to ensure dependability. Although the literature offers various automated REST API testing tools, their effectiveness in regression testing of the evolving REST APIs of healthcare IoT applications within a DevOps context remains undetermined. This article evaluates state-of-the-art and well-established REST API testing tools—specifically, RESTest, EvoMaster, Schemathesis, RESTler, and RestTestGen—for the regression testing of a real-world healthcare IoT application, considering failures, faults, coverage, regressions, and cost. We conducted experiments using all accessible REST APIs (17 APIs with 120 endpoints), and 14 releases evolved during DevOps. Overall, all tools generated tests leading to several failures, 18 potential faults, up to 84% coverage, and 23 regressions. Over 70% of tests generated by all tools fail to detect failures, resulting in significant overhead.
DOI: 10.1145/3765744
Authors: Hassan Sartaj, Shaukat Ali, Julie Marie Gjøby
Institutions: Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo Kommune
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Norges Forskningsråd
Awards: G5325494335, G7420047946
OpenAlex ID: W4413983086