Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

By : Dave Westerveld
1 (1)
Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

1 (1)
By: Dave Westerveld

Overview of this book

Postman enables the exploration and testing of web APIs, helping testers and developers figure out how an API works. With Postman, you can create effective test automation for any APIs. If you want to put your knowledge of APIs to work quickly, this practical guide to using Postman will help you get started. The book provides a hands-on approach to learning the implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running with Postman in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by taking you through the principles of effective API testing. A combination of theory coupled with real-world examples will help you learn how to use Postman to create well-designed, documented, and tested APIs. You'll then be able to try some hands-on projects that will teach you how to add test automation to an already existing API with Postman, and guide you in using Postman to create a well-designed API from scratch. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Postman to set up and run API tests for any API that you are working with.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: API Testing Theory and Terminology
6
Section 2: Using Postman When Working with an Existing API
13
Section 3: Using Postman to Develop an API

Running and fixing contract tests

In many ways, contract tests aren't that different from other tests that you create in Postman. The main difference is in how they are run and what the expectations around them are. Contract tests are meant to establish a contract for how the API should work, so they need to be run primarily by the API provider. Consumers will sometimes run them to double-check the work that the provider is doing, but the main purpose of them is for the API provider to check that they are not violating the contract as they make changes to the API.

Since these tests are meant to verify things as code changes are made, these tests should be run as part of the build pipeline for the API development team. I covered how to run tests in a build pipeline in Chapter 8, Running API Tests in CI with Newman, so you can check that chapter out for more details on how to do this.

On the consumer side, you don't need to run the tests every time you make changes....