Why You Should Take This Course
Web services and APIs have exploded in popularity over the past few years. More companies are adopting architectures such as:
- Software as a service
- Web service architecture
- Microservice architecture
These approaches present new opportunities and problems for teams to solve. To help them solve these challenges, teams are looking for testers who can help with:
- Testing features that lack a User interface
- Working with platforms of interconnected web services
- Building automated tests that integrate with APIs and web services
- Conduct exploratory testing against web services and APIs
‘Testing web services and APIs’ offers you the opportunity to learn about Web services / APIs and how to test them. You will be shown how to build HTTP requests to query and create data in web services. These skills will then be put to use to explore, plan and create both automated and exploratory tests. There will also be hands-on time to learn about popular API testing tools such as Postman and web proxies to help you in your testing activities.
The course itself is highly interactive. You will take part in exercises that offer a hands-on approach to learning the tools and ideas required to be successful in your testing. By the end of the course, you will have tested live APIs, searched for bugs and build automated tests to give you a real taste of Web service and API testing.
Richard’s workshop beautifully captures the power and the pitfalls of using automation tools in testing through the medium of duplo. It is simple, powerful and very effective. Taking part in this workshop should be mandatory for anyone who writes code (or wants to), anyone who works with coders or anyone who leads such people. - Ben Kelly, Director of Reliability Engineering @ Moneytree
I felt that this week's training nailed our intended outcome of increasing people's confidence and competence around automation in testing. The confidence part alone is huge as it had been a bit of a phantom for many people in the room for a long time. I am looking forward to people's stories about how they continue the momentum from the course - Sebastian Mutti, Tool-smith Specialist @ Swisscom
I think you have the right content in the course and also the balance between the practical and theoretical parts is done very well and keeps the flow alive and by the whole training very good to follow. - Sebastian Mutti, Tool-smith Specialist @ Swisscom
In November 2016 I attended Richard's Getting Started With Selenium Webdriver course at Selenium Conf 2016. Although my passion for testing was almost dead (my passion-for-testing-monitor showed a flat line), Richard really inspired me to become a great check automator through his passionate, holistic (personal <=> professional) approach of the topic and testing in general. I truly recommend Richard as a teacher and person for speaking about testing topics. - Joel Grimberg, Software Quality Consultant @ Xebia Group International
Like the best DJs, the facilitators were able to assess the mood in the room and tailor accordingly. Many courses I’ve been on have been hampered by a rigid itinerary, this was not the case at AiT. A constant feedback loop kept the participants engaged and enabled them to shape the class to their needs. - Chris Whitehorn
Best Software Testing workshop I've attended in recent years. Can't recommend it highly enough! - Jarsto van Santen, Software Test Engineer @ Dienst Uitvoering Onderwijs (DUO)
The 3 day AutomationInTesting course by @FriendlyTester & @2bittester was a blast! Valuable concepts to gain a deeper understanding of testing and how automation can help us. Lots of interactive discussions, hands-on exercises, real-life problem solving! Really recommended. - Lisi Hocke, Principal Agile Tester @ FlixBus
I wanted to send you a quick note to say thank you again for the great training you provided in Utrecht! It has had a significant impact on me, on how I understand and talk about automation and on how I approach many topics! - Jérôme Lasserre, Team Lead - Test Automation and Reporting Tools @ Ubisoft
First and foremost, kudos to Mark and Richard both for making [AiT] the best professional development experience I’ve had in my professional career. Every single person I talked to loved it. And I already started using the principles you taught us in everyday work decisions - Alex Landis, Software Test Engineer @ Daxko
Thank you for all the inspiration from the course! These past two weeks have been great. First of all we decided to go for Cypress, and the developers are stoked about how much they learn about the application when writing (or trying to write) tests. It has already resulted in some improvements in the code and has also given an explanation to some strange behaviour we haven't really been able to pinpoint before. Today we also had a small workshop, that I prepared based on your slides about auditing, where we did some models explaining the system - also much appreciated. - Sanna Huhta, Test Consultant @ ADDQ
What You Will Learn In This Course
In the morning we start by understanding and testing an individual web service. There will be many hands-on exercises with a web service filled with bugs to practise your new skills. We will focus on:
- What is a Web service?
- How to build requests to query and manipulate data from a Web service
- Test design techniques to consider when testing a Web service
- What is REST and what makes a Web service RESTful?
We will cover the basics of Postman to create requests and read responses. You’ll then use Postman to search for bugs with different test design techniques. By the end of the morning, attendees will be able to:
- Describe what a web service and an API is
- Explain the fundamentals of web service architectures
- Construct HTTP requests to query and manipulate data
- Choose different test design techniques when testing web services and APIs
- Deconstruct HTTP response to discover information and bugs
In the afternoon we build upon your new knowledge of how test web services and APIs. We will focus on a SaaS product and look at how we can learn about it and plan our testing. We will focus on:
- How to explore many web services in a product
- How to build a model of your web services
- Planning your testing based on your application model
- How to automate your tests using Postman
We will cover new tools such as web proxies, developer tools and log monitoring. These tools will help support your future testing activities. By the end of the afternoon, attendees will be able to:
- Choose different tools to help learn more about products that use web services and APIs
- Organise the information you learn into a model of the product to help plan your testing
- Plan different types of testing activities you would want to carry out using your model
- Construct different types of automated tests for your web services and APIs
I wanted to send you a quick note to say thank you again for the great training you provided in Utrecht! It has had a significant impact on me, on how I understand and talk about automation and on how I approach many topics! - Jérôme Lasserre, Team Lead - Test Automation and Reporting Tools @ Ubisoft
In November 2016 I attended Richard's Getting Started With Selenium Webdriver course at Selenium Conf 2016. Although my passion for testing was almost dead (my passion-for-testing-monitor showed a flat line), Richard really inspired me to become a great check automator through his passionate, holistic (personal <=> professional) approach of the topic and testing in general. I truly recommend Richard as a teacher and person for speaking about testing topics. - Joel Grimberg, Software Quality Consultant @ Xebia Group International
Thank you for all the inspiration from the course! These past two weeks have been great. First of all we decided to go for Cypress, and the developers are stoked about how much they learn about the application when writing (or trying to write) tests. It has already resulted in some improvements in the code and has also given an explanation to some strange behaviour we haven't really been able to pinpoint before. Today we also had a small workshop, that I prepared based on your slides about auditing, where we did some models explaining the system - also much appreciated. - Sanna Huhta, Test Consultant @ ADDQ
First and foremost, kudos to Mark and Richard both for making [AiT] the best professional development experience I’ve had in my professional career. Every single person I talked to loved it. And I already started using the principles you taught us in everyday work decisions - Alex Landis, Software Test Engineer @ Daxko
Richard’s workshop beautifully captures the power and the pitfalls of using automation tools in testing through the medium of duplo. It is simple, powerful and very effective. Taking part in this workshop should be mandatory for anyone who writes code (or wants to), anyone who works with coders or anyone who leads such people. - Ben Kelly, Director of Reliability Engineering @ Moneytree
I felt that this week's training nailed our intended outcome of increasing people's confidence and competence around automation in testing. The confidence part alone is huge as it had been a bit of a phantom for many people in the room for a long time. I am looking forward to people's stories about how they continue the momentum from the course - Sebastian Mutti, Tool-smith Specialist @ Swisscom
Best Software Testing workshop I've attended in recent years. Can't recommend it highly enough! - Jarsto van Santen, Software Test Engineer @ Dienst Uitvoering Onderwijs (DUO)
I think you have the right content in the course and also the balance between the practical and theoretical parts is done very well and keeps the flow alive and by the whole training very good to follow. - Sebastian Mutti, Tool-smith Specialist @ Swisscom
Like the best DJs, the facilitators were able to assess the mood in the room and tailor accordingly. Many courses I’ve been on have been hampered by a rigid itinerary, this was not the case at AiT. A constant feedback loop kept the participants engaged and enabled them to shape the class to their needs. - Chris Whitehorn
The 3 day AutomationInTesting course by @FriendlyTester & @2bittester was a blast! Valuable concepts to gain a deeper understanding of testing and how automation can help us. Lots of interactive discussions, hands-on exercises, real-life problem solving! Really recommended. - Lisi Hocke, Principal Agile Tester @ FlixBus
What You Will Need To Bring
Please bring a laptop, OS X, Linux or Windows that you can install software on and connect to easily wifi with.
Is This Course For You?
I have no coding or technical skills, should I come?
Yes, you should. The course is designed for beginners and experienced attendees alike. We will be using a tool called Postman, which is a great tool for beginners. It has a clean and simple user interface that hides the complexity. It’s automated testing features are very easy to use and even offers reusable code snippets. So no prior coding knowledge is needed.
I have some experience working with web services and APIs already. Is the course to basic for me?
Whilst the course goes back to the start of working with web services and APIs, it can be useful to go back to basics. We will be going over each aspect of HTTP in fine detail and exploring test design ideas for each part. You may find new tricks and tips that you before didn’t know, and improve your current understanding.