Workshop exploratory API testing
When thinking about API testing, many times our thoughts immediately focus on tools and writing code to perform automated checks for APIs.
What we sometimes tend to forget in the process, though, is that we might want to explore our APIs, too, to uncover any hidden problems and discover behaviour we did not consider or discuss during design or development.
The good news is, performing exploratory testing on APIs isn’t that different from performing exploratory testing on systems through a graphical user interface.
What does help, though, is having a good understanding of how APIs work, of the role APIs play in modern software systems and of common misunderstandings and misconceptions that negatively impact the quality of APIs.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to start performing exploratory testing on APIs using common tools and some guidelines to help you come up with ideas for tests.
Workshop outline
This workshop covers the following topics:
- The importance of testing APIs
- Tools that can help you get started
- Hands-on: performing our first tests on APIs
- Introduction to the POISED heuristic, to help us come up with test ideas
- Hands-on: using POISED to go deeper in our exploratory testing
- Interpreting and communicating exploratory API testing results
- Introduction to converting our experiments into automated tests
Intended audience and prerequisite knowledge
This course is aimed at software testers and developers that want to learn more about testing their APIs.
Some prior knowledge of APIs, HTTP and REST is beneficial. I am confident, however, that even without this you will find this workshop to be very useful.
Delivery and group size
This workshop is a great fit both for an on site or an online in house training session, as well as a half or full day conference tutorial. I recommend a maximum group size of around 15-20 people.
Duration
This workshop typically takes 3-4 hours, but can be extended to a full-day tutorial.
Interested?
If you would like to book me to teach this workshop in your organization or at your conference, or if you have any additional questions, please send an email to bas@ontestautomation.com or use the contact form on this page.
For an overview of all training courses and workshops I have on offer, please visit the main training page.