API Testing Foundations

Course details

The ability to quickly and effectively test APIs is a critical skill for software testers and QA engineers. In this intermediate-level course, instructor Dave Westerveld covers the basics of API testing, sharing how to work with several industry-standard tools for testing APIs at scale in an organization. After providing a primer on web services and important API terminology, Dave shows how to use Postman for some basic API exploration. He then goes over some basic approaches and methodologies used in testing GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests; discusses some of the details of performance and security testing; and more.

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Standing out as an API tester

1. Understanding Web Services and APIs

02 - Introduction to web services
03 - Your first tool - Postman
04 - Understanding API terminology
05 - Types of APIs

2. Getting Started with API Testing

06 - Risks of using services and APIs
07 - Install and set up API challenges
08 - Exploring an API
09 - Challenge - API discovery
10 - Solution - API discovery

3. API Authorization

11 - Overview of authorization and authentication
12 - Basic auth in API calls
13 - Using authorization tokens
14 - Finding Bearer Tokens
15 - Setting up OAuth

4. Hands-On API Testing

16 - Testing GET calls
17 - Testing PUT calls
18 - Testing DELETE calls
19 - Challenge - Break the API
20 - Solution - Break the API
21 - Understanding POST calls
22 - Testing POST calls
23 - Challenge - Access protected endpoints
24 - Solution - Access protected endpoints

5. Additional API Testing Consideration

25 - Using mocks, stubs, and fakes in API testing
26 - API automation
27 - Performance testing
28 - Security testing

Conclusion

29 - Resources to keep learning