Manual testing 33 - What is API testing? API Testing approach | Tools for API Testing | API defects

API Testing.
Approach of API Testing.
Tools for API Testing.
Types of API defects.
Types of API Testing.
Advantages of API Testing
Possible interview questions on API Testing.

What is API (Application Programming interface) Testing

API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.
Approach of API Testing
1. Understanding the functionality of the API program and clearly define the scope of the program
2. Apply test case design techniques such as equivalence classes, boundary value analysis and error guessing and write test cases for the API
3. Input Parameters for the API need to be planned and defined appropriately
4. Execute the test cases and compare expected and actual results.
Tools for API testing
• Soap-UI: It’s an easy-to-use tool with extensive REST and SOAP API testing capabilities – no scripting experience is required.
• Runscope
• Postman with jetpacks
• Postman with Newman
• Curl
• Check
• CTESK
• dotTEST
• Eclipse SDK tool- Automated API testing
Types of Bugs that API testing detects
• Fails to handle error conditions gracefully
• Missing or duplicate functionality
• Difficulty in connecting and getting a response from API.
• Security Issues
• Multi-threading issues
• Performance Issues. API response time is very high.
• Improper errors/warning to caller
• Incorrect handling of valid argument values
• Response Data is not structured correctly
What types of API testing we can do
• Functionality testing — the API works and does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
• Reliability testing — the API can be consistently connected to and lead to consistent results
• Load testing — the API can handle a large amount of calls
• Creativity testing — the API can handle being used in different ways.
• Security testing — the API has defined security requirements including authentication, permissions and access controls. See some API security tips for protecting vital data
• Proficiency testing — the API increases what developers are able to do.
• API documentation testing — also called discovery testing, the API documentation easily guides the user.
• Negative Testing — checking for every kind of wrong input the user can possibly supply
Advantages of API testing
Time Effective
API testing is far less time consuming than functional GUI testing.
Language-Independent
In an API test, data is exchanged using XML or JSON.
Easy Integration with GUI
With API testing, highly integrable tests are possible.
Test for Core Functionality
The first major advantage of API testing is access to the application without a user interface. Testing the core, code-level functionality of the application provides an early evaluation of its overall build strength before running GUI tests.

Possible interview questions on API Testing.

What is API Testing?
Which approach we have to follow for API Testing?
Which are the tools for API Testing?
What types of API defects we can get?
Which are the types of API Testing.
What are the advantages of API Testing
What are the difference between API testing and GUI testing

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