The testing activities we’ve discussed so far are essential parts of a testing strategy, but they are by no means the only opportunities available to us. Activities such as performance and security testing are sometimes considered things we can do at the end of a project. But as we’ll learn, these activities can and should be baked into a test strategy as early as we can reasonably action them. Not only can they expand our understanding of how our web APIs work and how others interact with them in production, but they are also exciting and innovative ways to expand our testing further.
We’ll learn a range of different ways to expand our testing strategy by first discovering ways to advance our automation with a myriad of tools and techniques in chapter 8. We’ll then discuss how contract testing can help extend our automation further and help teams to collaborate around API design in chapter 9. Next, we’ll discuss performance testing in chapter 10 and how we can begin planning and implementing this activity much earlier in a testing strategy than commonly thought. Chapter 11 will discuss how we can bake a security testing mindset into a range of activities we’ve already learned about such as modeling, exploratory testing, and automation. We’ll then conclude this part and the book by discovering how testing in production and site reliability engineering practices can help expand our testing strategy further into our live environments.