Hello Simon, and thank you for this opportunity to chat with the MoT community before Test.bash(); 2022, coming up tomorrow.
1. What was your approach to the challenge? Did you use a model or strategy or something else?
I didn’t have a particular model or strategy for my test approach - I just went at it similar to the way that I work, in that I review the situation and allow myself to re-evaluate as I progress.
2. What was the tooling and why did you use the tooling that you used? What other tooling could you have used?
I used Postman to answer the call in this case, and it’s honestly my favorite. I have some moderate ability with JMeter and could have also used that, but I find that Postman is easier for me to set up assertions with as I have a lot of comfort with Javascript.
3. What motivated you to take the challenge? How would you convince someone to do the same?
I’ll be honest - I’m a bit of a MoT fangirl, as the last online TestBash World was a big part of why I decided to pivot my career towards full-time QA this year. I’m also already versed in teaching Postman to others, so the overlap was too tempting.
4. How might you apply your learnings to your day-to-day job?
I think discussions about what is and is not in scope for API testing can be helpful to have, and determining what the reasonable use cases are and what is related to them.
5. How would you run the challenge with your colleagues?
It would be lovely to have the time and bandwidth to go through this for a portion of our own application’s API, or at least solve for business critical flows that could have disastrous down impacts.
6. What resources (articles, videos, artefacts) did you rely on to support you as you worked through the challenge? What resources might be worth someone looking at before and after?
I actually didn’t look into any videos or resources before or during the video other than one really fun page in the Postman documentation for dynamic variables (Dynamic variables | Postman Learning Center), as I wanted to randomize some of my request content. These include image links and catch phrases, which I thought were fun to use for kicks.
As for content to look at afterward, I’m most interested in viewing the other challenge submissions, but if this weren’t a TestBash, I would go to YouTube to see what other testers have done recently to approach automated API testing.
7. What one thing did you get most stuck on?
Funny enough, getting my recording down to 20 minutes was the most challenging aspect. Making test suites and talking while navigating Postman is something I have done quite a bit previously in an earlier role where I taught Postman and product APIs to business analysts. The challenge itself was enjoyable and direct.
8. What would a new challenge look like, inspired by the one you took?
I’m not sure, but I bet there are other publicly available APIs out there that would be fun to incorporate. Perhaps an integration challenge across APIs could be neat. A great place to start looking is the Explore area of Postman (Postman), which has thousands of APIs available for review and use.
Happy TestBash, folks! I look forward to chatting with everyone soon.