Classes restarted last week, and during the first week I found myself reading and writing a lot of introductory blog posts about upcoming semester course topics. As part of my setup tasks for CS-443 Software QA and Testing, I read about one of the most popular manual API Testing tools Postman and saw reference to TestProject, an automated testing tool from the same company Tricentis. So, I decided to do some further reading into TestProject as I understood the basics of manual testing, but had not seen automated testing in action yet. To do so, I found a blog post on the Tricentis site containing an overview tutorial of API testing and how platforms like Postman and TestProject can be valuable.
The post begins by discussing the value in API Testing and mentions the utility of Postman, but also brings up some of the limitations that are commonly encountered such as test automation, scheduling, and end-to-end test reporting. Intro TestProject → This testing platform offers solutions for end-to-end API testing by providing an environment to not only test API’s, manually but also to automate API-based test flows, schedule and run them periodically, and generate execution reports without the need for third party tools or writing any code.
The blog also contains a six chapter tutorial on using TestProject, so I delved into Chapter 1 – Basic API Test Automation. This emphasizes the platform’s ability to handle a wide variety of input sources like HTML, Databases, and more, then showing the application GUI and taking the reader through how to add ‘test steps’ in TestProject to set up automated testing for a GET HTTP request using NASA’s public APIs including search parameters and discussion on Dynamic Endpoint URLs (and implementing them) amongst others. Chapter 2 offers another brief tutorial discussing the value of scheduling automated tests with image steps (guide) to doing so with interactions to Android and iOS systems.
From these introductory chapters, I was able to get a basic idea of how to use TestProject to design calls, execute tests and access result reports. The other chapters in this TestProject tutorial cover more advanced API testing and validation flows, shell commands, scheduling API automation and more. As an introduction to Quality Assurance Testing and the course in general, this chapter was intriguing and valuable to get an idea of what an automated software testing tool looks like and how to use it in a basic sense. Stay tuned to read more about these other chapters and other topics in software quality assurance and testing and other exciting computer science related topics!
Sources:
General TP Post: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/automating-end-to-end-api-testing-flows/
Chapter 1: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/basic-api-test-automation/Chapter 2: https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/10/api-test-automation-flows-combined-with-mobile-functional-test/
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech. Worth Talking About by jelbirt and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.