Ripening of a RESTful API

How our product, the HERE Places RESTful API, ripened over time and how our understanding of quality changed over time. As every distinguished wine is the result of a long refining and ripening process, every software product is subject to a similar evolution, too. Of course along the journey of a product, the understanding of “Quality” is subject to major changes as well. Lets join the 3-year journey of a software product through its various stages, from planning, seeding to its first wine tasting (that is, the beta offer), to selling the first bottles (that is, the service is used by other internal products), finally to its market readiness (that is, becoming a commercial B2B offer with SLAs). The product under test is the Places RESTful API (places.demo.api.here.com), which delivers data for Places that are shown in various products, for instance for Nokia’s HERE.com maps. We concentrate on three different aspects and how they change over time: * the understanding of what quality means, * the test strategy, and last but not least * how to deal with the intrinsic complexity. We are going to explore the post production deployment part of our process: How we ensure the high availability of this complex service, as well as which test techniques, feedback mechanisms and in particular which visualizations (monitoring 2.0) we leverage for this purpose. Presented a the Agile Testing Days 2013.