As an API Engineer your team would like to make sure you are simulating a user experience prior to a deployment in a production environment. Which…

Integration tests are designed to verify the interactions between different components of a system. In the context of an Apigee API, this involves testing the entire request-response flow: from the client application, through the Apigee API proxy (including all its policies like security, traffic management, and mediation), to the backend target service, and back. This end-to-end testing approach is the most accurate way to simulate a real consumer's experience because it validates that all parts of the API delivery chain are working together as expected before a production deployment.

A. Unit tests: These focus on testing individual components, like a single JavaScript policy, in isolation, not the integrated flow a consumer would experience.

B. Smoke tests: These are a minimal set of tests to ensure basic stability and critical functionality, not a comprehensive simulation of various user interactions.

D. Code quality analysis: This is a static process that checks the source code (e.g., proxy XML) for standards and potential errors; it does not involve executing the API to simulate user interaction.

1. Google Cloud Documentation

DevOps tech: Continuous testing: "Integration tests verify interactions between components and systems

such as between a microservice and a database. Typically

integration tests are run after unit tests and before system tests." This definition directly supports using integration tests to validate how the API proxy (a component) interacts with its backend (another component)

which is central to simulating a user's call.

Source: Google Cloud Documentation

"DevOps tech: Continuous testing"

Section: "Types of tests".

2. Apigee Documentation

Testing and debugging: The documentation describes testing a deployed proxy by sending requests to it using tools like curl or other REST clients. This process inherently tests the integration of the proxy with the Apigee runtime and the configured target backend. "After you create and configure an API proxy

you are ready to test it. You can test your API proxy by sending a request to its URL using either curl or a REST client..."

Source: Apigee Documentation

"Test your API proxy"

Overview section.

3. Carnegie Mellon University

Software Engineering Institute

"Integration Testing": "Integration testing is a level of software testing where individual units are combined and tested as a group. The purpose of this level of testing is to expose faults in the interaction between integrated units." This academic definition reinforces that integration testing is the correct methodology for checking how different parts of the API system work together

which is what a consumer experiences.

Source: SEI (Software Engineering Institute) at Carnegie Mellon University

"Integration Testing" topic page.