Ministry of Testing has another 30 days of testing challenge, this time around API testing. Looks like fun, and I’ve been doing a lot of API testing lately, so I’ll follow along and see how many of them I can do over the next month.
The first one on the list is to define what API testing is. I actually see two distinct parts to API testing. In one case you could consider it to be testing of APIs themselves, but in another case you could look at it as testing an application or service using the APIs.
I tend to think of API testing in the second sense, although of course there is overlap between the two. To me, API testing is about using the API to help you discover useful information about the product. That might sometimes be finding actual bugs in the API, but often it can mean using the API to drive testing of other things, or finding issues in the way different parts of the service work together.
Not a formal definition, but that’s the way I think about it. How do you approach it?
offbeattesting 