Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Learn how to create, configure, and verify your first API contract test with SmartBear Swagger Contract Testing drift. Teams know contract testing prevents breaking API changes, but most stall out before they start – citing “we don't have time, we don't have the right skills, or we don't have the resources.” SmartBear Swagger Contract Testing removes that onboarding friction with drift, a capability that automates schema validation so you can adopt Interface-Driven Development (IDD), making your API specification the primary artifact of your build process in minutes.

Verification asks: Did we build the thing right? Validation asks: Did we build the right thing? When teams can answer both with confidence, they have more than quality software. They have application integrity: measurable assurance that the application works as intended.

Quick application integrity check: can your quality strategy survive the tsunami of code coming its way? AI is accelerating development, increasing code abstraction, and multiplying the volume of software teams need to validate. But existing QA approaches weren't built for this level of speed and scale. Application integrity closes the growing gap between what teams build and what they can verify, providing continuous assurance that software works as intended.

Learn how to automate API regression tests without writing code. In this tutorial, you'll use an OpenAPI specification to build automated API tests with SmartBear Swagger Functional Testing using a visual, low-code workflow. What this solves.

Outdated API docs and last-minute bugs cost teams time and trust. Learn how the OpenAPI Specification help you document, govern, and test your APIs from design to deployment – all inside SmartBear Swagger. SmartBear's Yousaf Nabi, Developer Advocate, and Chris Armstrong, Manager of Developer Relations, explain why API documentation drifts out of sync and walk through what's changed between OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2. After covering a brief history of Swagger and the OpenAPI specification, they demo the full API workflow across Swagger.

API testing gets harder as it grows: fragmented tools, brittle scripts, thousands of endpoints, and external dependencies that block progress. SmartBear ReadyAPI lets teams ship production-ready APIs faster by validating functionality, performance, and security in one test, with virtualization built in – no separate tools to juggle. In this Demo Den, Thomas Hurley, senior manager of product management at SmartBear, shows how one test does the work of three, so teams cut maintenance time and stop waiting on external dependencies.

AI tip: For pull requests, let your AI agent take the first pass before your team ever sees it. That's the workflow Ilia Mogilevsky, Software Engineering Manager at SmartBear, built. By packaging prompts into a skill loaded with Git history, Jira context, and CI checks, he turned a basic AI assistant into a reviewer he trusts. The skill then generates a structured report with approval-ready fixes. Accept the changes, adjust what's off, and push – review cycles shrink and deploys move faster.

The real bottleneck is knowing what to build before you start. Pro tip from Senior Software Engineer Josh Ellis: treat every AI agent every AI agent like a junior dev he's onboarding: define the what, the how, and the hard limits upfront. The plan drives the output, not the other way around.