SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, has released updates to Ready! API which strengthen its leadership in API testing and virtualization for enterprise software teams. Ready! API 1.6 includes support for Docker containers in load testing, added support for managing large-scale automated API test libraries and security certificates, and additional features to simplify deployment of virtual API sandboxes.

SmartBear introduced these new capabilities with the release of Ready! API 1.6 to help enterprise teams with genuine challenges left unaddressed by dev-centric design tools and API management platforms on the market today. While other vendors have mainly focused on creating and deploying APIs, they rarely address the problems in software quality that arise from speeding up development cycles without automating critical testing tasks. Development and QA teams working on large API deployment projects, especially in regulated environments, need testing tools that are easy to use, mature in capabilities and that apply across varying degrees of expertise.

“Enterprises in every industry are undergoing profound digital transformations, externally with APIs as products and internally with software engineering teams attempting to adopt DevOps and continuous delivery practices,” said John Purcell, Vice President of Products, API Readiness at SmartBear. “Professional development and testing teams need tools that support enterprise-level requirements like big data sets, multiple environments, company-issued security certificates, auditing and running only certain branches of tests based on continuous integration events.”

SmartBear leads the API economy with technologies such as Ready! API, SoapUI and Swagger, to help organizations around the world deliver high-quality APIs quickly and efficiently, leveraging API design and testing artifacts throughout the entire API delivery lifecycle. Ready! API 1.6 includes:

• Large-scale API functional test management and conditional test execution in SoapUI NG Pro
• Docker support for either on-premise or cloud-based load generators
• Improved support for enterprise deployment of virtual API sandboxes using ServiceV Pro and VirtServer

SoapUI NG Pro provides enterprise API teams the flexibility they need to comprehensively test both legacy SOAP Web services and REST APIs. Features that allow professionals to efficiently manage large test suites with hundreds of artifacts, big data sets, multiple environments and customizations are only available in SoapUI NG Pro, part of the Ready! API platform. Additional support for conditional test execution gives test automation engineers the control they need to meet BDD design and Continuous Deployment challenges.

LoadUI NG Pro now supports running on-premise or cloud load generators using Docker containers, so that organizations can quickly and inexpensively spin up large-scale load tests without the additional overhead of machine-level virtualization. With LoadUI NG Pro, you can use the public dockerfile images available for download from DockerHub as part of the release, further simplifying API load testing for automation engineers and infrastructure teams.

ServiceV Pro, the world’s easiest virtual API sandbox designer, along with VirtServer continues to strengthen its enterprise-level service virtualization features for SOAP, REST and JMS-based back-end systems. In this update, improvements to transaction logging, auditing, user management and certificate-based security solidify VirtServer as the go-to API mocking and virtualization solution for thousands of professionals in organizations around the world.

For more information on the Ready! API tools, visit: http://smartbear.com/product/ready-api/overview/.