Table of Contents
What is API?
Before learning API automation testing you should know about what is API ?
An API is the bridge between the client and the server. The client here can be a computer or phone using different operating systems and written in different languages. Similarly, the back-end server is also written in different languages. In order for these two guys to be able to talk to each other, they must speak the same language. That language is the API.
Let’s take a simple example for this problem: Suppose you are a tour guide, and manage a tour group of the United States of America. In the group there are Russian, American, Japanese, Swedish, German, French. To be able to do things smoothly, all this group must speak the same language, be it English or French. Here the tour guide will act as the Server, the tourist will act as the client.
When traveling on the road or visiting tourist attractions, visitors can ask the guide “What is that?”, “How to eat this fruit?”. With each such act of asking, the corresponds to sending a request to the server with input parameters such as “that” or “this fruit”. (Sending request is also known as Call API). For each question, the guide will answer in a different way – this is called a response.
The format in the above question and answer can be through live chat or writing. In the API, there are 2 main formats, xml and json.
Is API automation testing or API manual testing?
API Testing can be Manual and Automation by DevOps, QA, and developer to practice continuous testing. You can use the SOAP UI Tool to test the APIs through manual and automation.
Coding knowledge is required to automate some parts of it. There are other tools also available for API automation testing like Postman, JMeter etc.
In the next articles, we will learn more about Postman.
Why use API automation testing?
During project implementation, the server and client parts work independently of each other, so there are many places where the client has not finished, we can’t wait for the client to finish to test the data, but test the API with another tool. Now the test is completely independent of the client.
Even when the client is done, if I test on the client and see errors related to logic and data, we also need to test the API to know exactly if the server is wrong or the client is wrong, fixing the error will be faster.
When making a web services system, project only writes APIs for other parties to use, we will not have a client to test like other projects, must test the API completely.
Thank you for reading, next time we wil learn about Protocols in API testing. You can read more articles about API testing by this link
