1. Agile testing for web API with Postman
Presented by Anthony Todisco
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2. Advanced Automated Testing
Agenda
API and Agile
API testing
Rest-assured
Postman
Our journey with Postman
Key takeaway
Q&A
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3. Advanced Automated Testing
API and Agile
Growth in the number of API
Importance of time to market
Today, we see an explosion of the number of web APIs in the industry due to the popularity of the client-server paradigm in consumer and business products.
More and more companies are making the shift-left towards DevOps continuous integration and continuous deployment development, because time to market is the key in today’s business
That means development and our feedback need to be quicker than ever in order to determine if our applications are ready to ship or not.
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4. Advanced Automated Testing
API and Agile
Agile methodology to produce quick results
But UI testing is currently:
too slow
Not adapted to Agile
The Agile methodology is a great help to quickly produce value, respond to customer demands and have feedback.
However focusing only on UI automation can kill your test automation efforts. There is a host of reasons why. The main one being that UI tests are notoriously slow.
That singular reason is why API testing is so important and why you should have it as part of your overall automation strategy.
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5. Advanced Automated Testing
API and tests
Test automation is the key
Multiple possibilities for test automation
Which one to choose?
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6. Advanced Automated Testing
Rest-assured test
First choice for most people
Java Domain Specific Language (DSL) for test
Support response parsing (XML and JSON)
BDD Syntax:
Easy reading
Maintainable
Source code and tests in the same project
Rest-assured is one of the top answer for this question and for most people first choice for automation.
Rest-assured is a fluent Java library you can use to test HTTP-based REST services. It’s designed with testing in mind, and it integrates with any existing Java-based automation framework.
It provides a BDD-like DSL that makes creating API testing in Java simple. It also has a bunch of baked-in functionalities, which means you don’t have to code things from scratch.
If your team is made up mainly of Java coders, this will be the best choice
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7. Advanced Automated Testing
Rest-assured test
No report  need another unit test framework
What if your code is not Java ?
If your QAs are not developers ?
At first glance, Rest assured seems to be the perfect solution
But, it does not have a integrate way to export result in HTML or XML, you will need another unit test framework for this
Other point, if your project is not in Java, will you choose to use another development environment for test ?
And last but not the least, if your QA team is not found of coding
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8. Advanced Automated Testing
Postman
A UI tool for API testing
Good for:
Exploratory tests
Functional and automated tests
Easy to use
Support response parsing (XML and JSON)
Define the concept of collection for a group of requests
You might want to consider Postman.
Postman is a nice option for exploratory-type API testing but it’s also powerful enough that you can create more integrated solutions if you wish.
It is a UI tool to test API by sending web request and getting back reply
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9. Advanced Automated Testing
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10. Advanced Automated Testing
Postman
CLI (Newman) that integrates greatly with Jenkins
CLI, XML and HTML reports
Support SOAP call
Basic Javascript testing with boolean
Postman also has a command line integration named Newman that interacts very well with Jenkins
This command line allows you to have a CLI, XML and HTML report.
Moreover, you can also create your own export and customize the output template
Postman also support SOAP call for your tests
And finally tests are written with basic javascript
Show example of test
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11. Our journey with Postman: Split
1830 lines
500 lines
lines
2100 lines
Less than 4000 lines
Ok, so now, you’ve seen why we choose Postman. But even if everything seems good, we faced some “issues” by using it
At first, we have a nice collection with some tests. Then, we started to add more and more tests in it and finally we get a really big file.
Since we were multiple people working on it, it begun to be difficult to follow what was exactly changed on our source control tool and we faced some issue while merging
So we decided to split our big collection into small ones. And like this we gain on checking time, on merge time and multiple QA can works on the same time
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12. Our journey with Postman: Combine
As a counterpart of the split, we cannot generate anymore our full report file.
Indeed, to generate this, the Newman command take only one collection file as input.
So, using the some infos provided by Postman and the fact that collection files are JSON files, we created an internal tool, that we named orchestrator, to combine them into one and retrieve our first big collection. After that we can run back our Newman command
And Tada!!!
Back again with our beautiful report
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13. Our journey with Postman: BDD
Reporting and sharing tasks problems solved
But remember we are an Agile team and in an Agile team, the testing part involve everyone
So why not using BDD in order to achieve this
The basic testing way in Postman is not fit for this approach
Postman is in fact a node application, so we can load by using a little javascript trick an external code
Like this we can load a describe-it syntax that makes our test structure more readable
With this, we can share with all the team and even externally this kind of test skeleton in order to validate our behavior
It also loads methods that help you writing in a human readable language for the tests
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14. Our journey with Postman: Replication
Saved re-usable functions into Postman environment
Use the collection structure at your advantage
5 lines on every collection
Everything seems nice now
But we’ve found another point that we wanted to fix: the code replication
Indeed, some tests and even some part of the tests were repeated on multiple places and if there was even a small change, we needed to update every collection we created.
Postman gives you a helping hand on this with two things:
Save functions in Postman environment
Use structured call to avoid duplication
In Postman the basic workflow is the following, you send a request and receive a response on which one you can run your tests
You can even define some actions on a pre-request script
In order to avoid duplicating some code, you can use the structure.
You have a Collection level pre-request script that will be call before every requests, then another one at folder level and then the current request pre-request script
The same apply to test scripts
510 lines on every request
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15. Our journey with Postman: Feedbacks
80 %
Reduction of file size (after splitting)
30 %
Time reduction on develop/review per US
Easiness
Using BDD and re-used function
Better
communication
Between developers, QAs and PO with BDD
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16. Advanced Automated Testing
Key takeaway
Simple yet powerful tool
Use small collections to share work
Integration of Newman with Jenkins
Avoid duplicate code by using environment
Use Collection structure to your advantage
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17. Thank you
Any questions?
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