Introduction
I've laid down some of the high-level ideas about Beekn in previous posts. Now, I want to give you a more concrete description of a Beekn and what problems it tries to solve.
We found out that back-end testing is many times neglected. There is not enough time or knowledge. Engineers might feel overwhelmed to set up an extensive testing application or learn a new scripting language. Sometimes you only want to demonstrate that your back-end services work as expected in the defined or undefined test scenarios. You might also want to test with more random data to find some payloads that should work and vice versa.
Why Beekn?
Beekn is bridging the knowledge and time constraint gaps when doing back-end testing. It is instrumental in smaller teams where team members are more generalists and share many tasks.
Postman or other rich HTTP clients are typically used to doing manual testing, but in our experience, the next level of automation is more uncommon. Of course, that might not be your case, and your team is using the advanced capabilities of your favorite HTTP testing client.
At Beekn, we want to provide a focused and low-friction back-end testing experience and the freedom to set up tests manually. The Beekn web application UI is specific for HTTP API testing, with a short learning curve for any tester with any background. If you have HTTP API definitions (Swagger), you can automatically set Beekn to generate tests with different payloads and parameters. We use machine learning algorithms and models to help you create tests and test data.
Using Beekn, the testers and QA engineers will focus more on running functional, regression, or smoke testing of HTTP services instead of technological barriers and test data generation.
We believe that the Zero-Install and Zero-Code (codeless) approach is a stepping stone to make back-end testing more accessible. Beekn does not require you have any infrastructure or servers to run it. You can quickly configure it through the Beekn web application, download it to your laptop, and run it. The executable is ready for your target operating systems like Windows, Linux, or macOS.
What is a Beekn?
Beekn is a 2-part application.
1. Beekn Web
Beekn Web is a configuration application where you can define and build your Beekn tools. We will show you this application soon. The next step is to download a Beekn tool and run it.
2. Beekn Tool
When you download a Beekn executable, you can run it immediately. Depending on your needs, you can also run it on your server, CI/CD system, or in a container. Below is the first public image of the Beekn tool running on a laptop after the download. When run, it starts executing tests and asserts and reports back the results. The Beekn on the screenshot runs continuously every minute, but you can configure the Beekn to run only once or continuously by defining the interval.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we want our customers to do more back-end testing by lowering the barrier for their teams and providing high-quality software and service. You can imagine a Beekn as a beacon, scanning, testing, and watching your back-end applications by detecting anomalies and failures.
Next time, we will show you the Beekn Web UI configuration application :).