API Testing

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Table of Contents [show]     1 What is the difference between API testing and unit testing     2 What do we do during API testing?     3 How do we control the scale of API testing? Copyright Information This article is licensed under GNU Public License. Contact webmasters for more information on copyright issues. 1 What is the difference between API testing and unit testing Who: unit testing is usually done by development team, while API testing is usually done by QA Scale: unit testing usually doesn't consider too much about system level testing, like what impacts other methods may have on this method etc. 2 What do we do during API testing? Create or use a harness that supports creation of applications that simulate the use of these APIs, and supports passing various parameters to the API. Especially parameter combinations to verify all positive scenarios expose all expected errors test boundary conditions and sequence of API calls to verify that the APIs work fine together. 3 How do we control the scale of API testing? API testing is different from command-line interface (CLI) testing and GUI testing in many ways, one of them being the enormous amount of possible combinations. Because of the different nature of API testing compared with CLI testing and GUI testing, you should accept the fact that you are not going to be able to cover every scenario, and focus on covering most likely scenarios. [LG] Comments References [LG] http://www.logigear.com/newsletter/api_vs_unit.asp