risk-profile-analysis.md

id	risk-profile-analysis
title	Risk Profile Analysis
sidebar_label	Risk Profile Analysis
description	Discover Keploy's Risk Profile Analysis feature, which automatically classifies API test failures as High, Medium, or Low risk, helping you instantly distinguish between breaking changes and minor updates.
tags	risk-analysis change-management breaking-changes
keywords	risk analysis breaking changes High Risk Medium Risk Low Risk Risk Categories Schema Changed Schema Broken

import ProductTier from '@site/src/components/ProductTier';

When API contracts change, tests are expected to fail. However, not all failures are equal. A minor, backward-compatible change (like adding a new optional field) is very different from a major, breaking change (like removing a field or changing a data type).

The Risk Profile Analysis feature addresses this by automatically categorizing each test failure based on its potential impact. It assigns a risk level of High, Medium, or Low, giving developers immediate insight into the severity and nature of API changes. This helps distinguish between intentional contract updates and unintentional bugs right from the test report.

Key Concepts

When a test fails, it is now assigned a risk level:

• HIGH: Indicates a likely breaking change to the API contract. This is the highest level of risk.

  • Triggers: Status code changes, Content-Type header changes, removing fields from a JSON body, or changing the data type of a field (e.g., string to number).

• MEDIUM: Indicates a change that might affect consumers but is not a direct contract violation.

  • Triggers: Changes in header values (other than Content-Type), or changes to field values within a JSON body while new fields are also being added.

• LOW: Indicates a backward-compatible, non-breaking change.

  • Triggers: Only adding new, optional fields to a JSON body.

To provide more detail, failures are also assigned one or more categories:

• SCHEMA_BROKEN: A breaking change occurred in the response body (field removed, type changed).
• SCHEMA_ADDED: Only new fields were added to the response body.
• SCHEMA_UNCHANGED: The response body schema is identical, but values within it have changed.
• STATUS_CODE_CHANGED: The HTTP status code was different from the expected one.
• HEADER_CHANGED: One or more headers were different.

How Risk Profiling Works During Testing

1. Failure Detection: Keploy runs tests as usual. When a response mismatch is detected, the new analysis logic is triggered.
2. Deep Comparison: Keploy performs a detailed comparison of the expected versus actual responses:
   • Status Code: Checks for any mismatch.
   • Headers: Pays special attention to the Content-Type header.
   • JSON Body: Analyzes the nature of the difference by comparing the structure of the expected and actual JSON payloads to identify added fields, removed fields, and data type changes.
3. Risk Assessment: Based on the comparison, a RiskLevel and one or more FailureCategory tags are assigned to the test result.
4. Enhanced Reporting: The test report (test-run-*-report.yaml) is updated to include these new details. The summary now includes counts for high, medium, and low-risk failures, and each individual failed test specifies its risk and category.

Example Test Report Snippet:

version: 2.0.0
name: test-set-0
status: FAILED
success: 0
failure: 12
high-risk: 7
medium-risk: 4
low-risk: 1
total: 12
tests:
  - name: test-1
    status: FAILED
    # ... other fields
    failure_info:
      risk: HIGH
      category:
        - SCHEMA_BROKEN
  - name: test-2
    status: FAILED
    # ... other fields
    failure_info:
      risk: LOW
      category:
        - SCHEMA_ADDED