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

Defining data-driven testing

Data-driven testing is not unique to API tests. It can be used in other types of automation as well. For example, you could set up UI tests or even unit tests to use data-driven testing techniques. In this section, I will explain what data-driven testing is. I will also teach you some principles that you can use to create good inputs for data-driven tests. In addition, this section will cover how to set up good test comparisons and how to set up the outputs for data-driven tests. But what exactly is data-driven testing?

Essentially, this technique involves creating a table of inputs that map to expected outputs and then running those inputs through the system under test and checking whether the outputs of the tests match the outputs in the table. You may also hear this test technique described as table-driven testing or parameterized testing.

That is all a bit abstract, so let me try to explain it with an example to help you understand what this...