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

Chapter 7: Data-Driven Testing

One of the great things about test automation is the ability to try out many different things without getting bored. In fact, one of the heuristics I use for determining whether I should automate something is to ask myself whether what I am doing is boring. If I am working on boring and repetitive work, it's a good indicator that I might be working on something that should be automated.

Sometimes, creating test automation itself can get boring, though. You may want to create tests for several inputs to a request that are all quite similar. Creating good test cases can involve trying out many different inputs to the system. Automation is good at checking many things over and over, but it can take a lot of work to create separate requests for each of those inputs. So, rather than doing that and duplicating a lot of work, you can use something called data-driven testing to increase the efficiency of your automated tests.

This chapter will teach...