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

Setting up contract tests in Postman

Creating contract tests is similar to creating any API test: you need to create a collection and then make requests in that collection with tests in them. But what kind of tests do you create when you perform contract testing?

In Chapter 10, Testing an Existing API, I talked about smoke tests. These are a targeted set of tests that you can run quickly to get a good idea of how your API is doing. A contract collection is a similar idea, but with a bit more comprehensive coverage. The idea of contract tests is to describe all the different parts of the API that you need, but not to do things such as look at how to use them in a workflow or other aspects of testing. Contract tests are a good way to set the minimum bar for what needs to be working, but you will need to do additional testing beyond them for it to be effective. Of course, as with any other testing that's done in Postman, you will need to create a collection for your contract tests...