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What is API Testing?

If a user decides to book a flight and pays via a third-party payment service such as PayPal, API testing should be performed to ensure that the payment service and travel booking systems communicate effectively, process the payment, and keep the user's sensitive data secure. Without testing the APIs themselves, developers and testers would be stuck waiting for the entire application stack to be assembled before they can run the test.

API testing is a type of software testing, including direct API testing, and also as a part of integration testing to check whether the API meets the application's functional, reliability, performance, and security expectations. API testing focuses on analyzing business logic and protecting applications and responding to data requests.

The testing API differs from other types of software tests in that a graphical user interface is not available, however, you need to set up a source environment that calls the API with the required parameters and validates the test result.

While developers typically test only the basic functionality on which they are working, testers are challenged to test the functionality, performance, and security of an API, regardless of whether it is a performance, security, functional correctness, or just a health check. Performance testing enables that an API can respond to requests of a certain size or to meet system requirements quickly enough.

API testing, by comparison to UI testing, can typically save up to eight hours - allowing developers to release products faster - confirms that the performance, functionality, security, and reliability of the application are working as expected - Our QA engineers can help your team through the API testing process to ensure that your software application is deployed to a production environment successfully every time.

When testing APIs, test cases for each endpoint or group of endpoints that are intended to work together (ie functional flow such as logon) can be developed to ensure that the API works as expected for possible known input configurations. At this point, you need to combine application data with the API tests to ensure that the API works as expected for all possible input configurations.

An API test is a type of software testing that analyzes the output of the first application / database / application to ensure that it meets expected functionality, security, performance and reliability. APIs should be tested in both the testing environment and the development environment to confirm that the software application meets requirements.

API testing involves testing the application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. Since APIs lack a GUI, API testing is performed at the message layer. API testing is critical for automating testing because APIs now serve as the primary interface to application logic and because GUI tests are difficult to maintain with the short release cycles and frequent changes commonly used with Agile software development and DevOps.

Hope this article helps you to get started with API automation testing using Python. Please share your comment below for any concerns. Happy testing!

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