foreword
This book, Testing Web APIs, is much more than you might expect from a book on how to test APIs. It presents API testing as part of a holistic, risk-based testing strategy. Mark guides you with a range of helpful visual models, asking questions to make you think, and takes you along as a participant, not a passenger.
Before he digs into details, Mark has a chapter on “why we test” and how to identify different types of risks. He takes this important topic one step further—matching risks with quality characteristics and how they relate to a test strategy.
Mark lists a set of prerequisites for getting the most out of the book. Practitioners who are comfortable with coding, HTTP, and various developer and testing tools will learn great tools and techniques to understand all aspects of how their APIs behave. However, it is also a book for people who may not have all those prerequisites. A first read-through will give you insight and inspire you to try the well-explained learning activities during your second time around.
The many examples in the book, as well as the exercises, are based on a realistic project using a real application. You can start exploring and learning about the product, its business domain, history, and existing bugs—just like in real life. You can even use the product’s UI to get more familiar with it.