Beyond "It Works": A Benchmark for API Integration Quality

A proposed open-source benchmark harness evaluates backend API integrations by running applications against a controllable mock provider and measuring behavior rather than implementation style, addressing failures that conventional tests often miss, such as newly added enum values, retry-induced duplicate writes, malformed upstream responses, leaked internals, and configuration that fails only on first use. It uses a production-readiness gate of sixteen behavioral properties covering reliability, error handling, ordinary-path correctness, security, and startup, followed only after a green gate by a four-part quality scorecard for correctness depth, resilience to non-breaking provider drift, maintainability, and security depth. The framework combines a fault-injecting recording mock, drift engine, hermetic runner, quality tooling, and provider-specific known-good references with injectable defects to validate that checks actually detect their intended problems. A real .NET billing integration that appeared strong in review and passed most visible tests revealed missing startup validation and duplicate POSTs after transport failures, including one issue found only in a hidden holdout pass. The methodology emphasizes portable black-box assertions, separates shippability from quality, avoids a single weighted score, and allows the visible gate to support iterative development while keeping holdout cases and test profiles separate from the integration author.

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