Helping building API experience - hitting a break wall

Hello everyone

I am slowly building my API testing knowledge. I am using Postman and Intellj. The lessons on Pulral site are going very very slow. Ive done the lessons on how to refactor from a file and inherit URL information. I have the hunger to learn more but I feel like the learning material on Plural site is slowly me down but I dont know if its just me?
My next step really is, how do I go and get real experience? I remember back in the days when I was first learning how to test, I took up some open source project work and built up my experience from there.
Problem I am seeing now from recruiters is, they are asking for commercial experience. But how do I go out about getting commercial experience or even open source API testing experience?

I feel like Iam hitting a break wall and I cant get anywhere. Its really getting me down and I dont know who to turn to or where to go next.

I guess a better question is, how did anyone get into API Testing as a job? Was it through a junior entry role? Or just got lucky?

Hello @mazza!

I was assigned to a project as Test Lead. That project just happen to require some API development and my team would be testing those APIs. In this case, a technical background helped get me the assignment; luck probably played a small part.

I don’t see APIs all the differently from any other HTTP transaction. There is a request to and a response from a server, and requester usually processes the response. In that sense, if you have tested web sites, you have the basics for evaluating APIs.
When the request resolves to a web page, the response is an HTML document. Similarly, when the request resolves to an API endpoint, the response is information (formatted as JSON or XML). The information objectives for testing focus on what happens after the data arrives.

In my opinion, an API response is entirely more testable than an HTML response. I have found the information is more finite in its interpretation when an API is designed well. The same risks exist - transaction errors, data incorrect or formatted poorly, and dependencies all can impact the API operation.

Postman (and tools like it) are a great start. They provide a platform to inspect and exercise API behaviors from a user perspective. In my opinion, unit tests do most of the heavy lift in evaluating API behaviors. I think tester can and should influence what is tested in API unit tests.

Joe

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