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

Finding bugs in an API

Finding bugs can be easy. Sometimes they just jump right out at you. However, the easy-to-find bugs aren't usually the ones that matter. Good testers are those who can find the hidden bugs that matter. Doing this is often difficult and takes some practice. In this chapter, I will help you to get started with creating good automated tests, but before going deep into that, I want to give you some practice at the skill of looking for bugs. In this section, I will help you to set up an API locally that you can use for testing.

I will then show you how to do some testing and exploration of this API and help you to find some bugs in it. I will also show you how to reset the service. This API is meant to break sometimes and so you may need to reset it back to its original state. I will also show you the steps to find one of the bugs in the system so that you can get a bit of an idea of how to go about doing this. Let's dive into this by setting up the...