While there are several types of APIs, I’ll focus on a few of the most common ones for a quick overview.
REST: The most common API used today is the Web Service API and is stateless in nature. REST uses several standards such as HTTP, JSON, URL, and XML.
SOAP: One of the original protocols, less commonly used due to its strict standards. SOAP uses the HTTP and XML standards.
API actions
These are the different actions you can take when testing an API:
GET: This is the most common action and a way to simply tell a web service that you want to retrieve or retrieve some information.
Use heuristics to ensure you’re not only checking for sunny day scenarios
DELETE: This action allows you to delete something.
Make sure you test that you can’t delete things you shouldn’t have. On the other hand, can you delete what you have permission to do?
POST: This action tells the server that you want to create something new. For example, if you want to create a new product, you can use this action. To do so, you need to provide parameters so that it knows what you want to create.
Ensure that malicious users cannot intentionally cause harm OR unknowingly cause harm. This may include sending incorrect or missing parameter data, such as required fields.
PUT: This action performs an action on something existing, such as updating an existing product. Similar testing strategies can be used between PUT and POST calls.
Mobile API Testing
Mobile API testing can be done similarly to web API testing using an appropriate testing tool such as Postman.
Best Practices and Random Advice
- The parameters to be used during testing should be specified in the test case.
- Be careful when using the Delete or Purge functions, these are one-time calls.
- If you are testing multiple APIs, consider the order of the calls.
- Before starting, start by outlining all the test scenarios; group the tests accordingly.
Be sure to check out similar API Tester. API tester follows the best modeling practices. If a person faces any chaos or problem, the QA team is also there to help them in this regard making API tester a great choice.