Points to take care while planning for API Testing:
1. Ensuring that the test harness varies parameters of the API calls in ways that verify functionality and expose failures. This includes assigning common parameter values as well as exploring boundary conditions.
2. Generating interesting parameter value combinations for calls with two or more parameters.
3. Determining the content under which an API call is made. This might include setting external environment conditions (files, peripheral devices, and so forth) and also internal stored data that affect the API.
4. Sequencing API calls to vary the order in which the functionality is exercised and to make the API produce useful results from successive calls.
By analyzing the problems listed above, a strategy needs to be formulated for testing the API. The API to be tested would require some environment for it to work. Hence it is required that all the conditions and prerequisites understood by the tester. The next step would be to identify and study its points of entry. The GUIs would have items like menus, buttons, check boxes, and combo lists that would trigger the event or action to be taken. Similarly, for APIs, the input parameters, the events that trigger the API would act as the point of entry. Subsequently, a chief task is to analyze the points of entry as well as significant output items. The input parameters should be tested with the valid and invalid values using strategies like the boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning. The fourth step is to understand the purpose of the routines, the contexts in which they are to be used. Once all this parameter selections and combinations are designed, different call sequences need to be explored.
The steps can be summarized as following:
1. Identify the initial conditions required for testing.
2. Identify the parameters – Choosing the values of individual parameters.
3. Identify the combination of parameters – pick out the possible and applicable parameter combinations with multiple parameters.
4. Identify the order to make the calls – deciding the order in which to make the calls to force the API to exhibit its functionality.
5. Observe the output.
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