Track papers across labs, topics, and trends.
Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper reports on a 3-year experience using the EvoMaster REST API fuzzer at Volkswagen AG, identifying key gaps between academic prototypes and industrial needs. Through real-world application and a user study with 11 testing specialists, the authors pinpoint necessary features for successful industrial fuzzing, such as improved API specification handling and better integration with existing testing workflows. The study highlights open research challenges hindering the practical adoption of automated REST API testing in industry.
Academic fuzzers often fall short in industrial settings due to unmet needs like seamless integration with existing workflows and robust API specification handling.
REST APIs are widely used in industry, in all different kinds of domains. An example is Volkswagen AG, a German automobile manufacturer. Established testing approaches for REST APIs are time consuming, and require expertise from professional test engineers. Due to its cost and importance, in the scientific literature several approaches have been proposed to automatically test REST APIs. The open-source, search-based fuzzer EvoMaster is one of such tools proposed in the academic literature. However, how academic prototypes can be integrated in industry and have real impact to software engineering practice requires more investigation. In this paper, we report on our experience in using EvoMaster at Volkswagen AG, as an EvoMaster user from 2023 to 2026. We share our learnt lessons, and discuss several features needed to be implemented in EvoMaster to make its use in an industrial context successful. Feedback about value in industrial setups of EvoMaster was given from Volkswagen AG about 4 APIs. Additionally, a user study was conducted involving 11 testing specialists from 4 different companies. We further identify several real-world research challenges that still need to be solved.