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

Exploring and automating

It is easy to think of test automation as a way to quickly do the things that we could do in a manual way. There can be times where this is true. If you are doing some tedious, repetitive work that requires doing the same thing over and over again, by all means automate it if you can! However, there is danger that comes with this kind of thinking as well. If you start to think of automation as replacing what humans do, you will end up making poor automation. Manual and automated testing may have the same goal of reducing the risk of shipping bugs to clients, but the way that they achieve this goal is radically different.

For example, a manual test that is meant to help you figure out if a change to the API has caused issues will be guided by what you, as the tester, know about the change you've made. It will also be influenced by the tester themselves. If you are familiar with the API, you will try and observe different things than someone who is not...