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API testing - concepts in depth

Jan 18, 2024, 2:21 PM:  ~ 5 min read

API testing - concepts in depth

Article based on real life feedback. So, challenge accepted!

You should maybe start with a simple example of what API is, like a restaurant - customer, waiter and the cook

The restaurant

  • Is the bit of code that does some logic. But maybe I'll have to go back a few steps because there is some context missing. Before the payload (the information) gets to an API there are some systems which can get a little bit of attention. There is the network (internet or same computer, doesn’t matter, but there is something in between). But between the network and the code there is a server. The server’s responsibility is to accept connections and then based on ...
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API testing - Intro

Jan 6, 2024, 2:21 PM:  ~ 7 min read

How APIs work and what they are:

They are some pieces of code accessible publicly in various ways, that try to apply the logic over the what’s given to them.

  • What’s sent is called a payload.
  • What’s returned is called a response.
  • The payload sent in the url can be generically called url parameter.
  • The receiver of the payload is called endpoint.

Thank you for reading the TL;DR section. From here on we will go in-depth on how to debug them and how to think about testing APIs.

How to think:

APIs are not only things over the internet accessible through URLs. API refers to any collection of standardized names that when called do something. For example the API of ...

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Selectors / locators - Deep dive

Jan 4, 2024, 2:21 PM:  ~ 8 min read

Siblings, parents, ancestors, madness

  • Imagine the web page like a city with adjacent buildings of different heights. The street is <html> tag. The buildings are <head>,<body> etc.
  • Now imagine you are an apartment. So apartment == element.
  • Sibling elements are the same floor apartments.
  • The parent element is the flat itself. Because it holds you inside it.
  • The street is your ancestor because it holds your parent, the flat. The ancestor can be as far away as you want it to be.
  • Relative to you, the child elements are the rooms. Because they are inside you.
  • These names apply for both CSS and XPath. They are concepts.
  • Sorry, there is no madness, but t ...
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Selectors / locators - why are they important?

Jan 3, 2024, 2:21 PM:  ~ 10 min read

How selectors work and what are they

  • Selectors (or locators) are only some pieces of text that help us identify something in a document. How they look like, the syntax, is an agreement between the creator of structure and the user.
  • I use the word structure instead of document or web page because selectors work for anything. Heck, technically even Regex (Regular expressions) can be considered as selectors up to a point. There are JSON selectors, DB selectors etc, apps structure, excel documents structure etc.
  • There is a bit of software called an interpreter which is coded to understand the text of selectors and return some parts of the structure accordingly.
  • Same s ...
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