Methods and apparatus for enabling the framework and the application code associated with an application programming interface (API) to be efficiently and comprehensively tested are disclosed. According to one aspect of the present invention, a structure that defines an API test in declarative metadata includes an entity to be tested, a first metadata arrangement, and a second metadata arrangement. The first metadata arrangement includes any data to be used when the entity is tested, and the second metadata arrangement includes any expected outputs associated with testing the entity.