To understand how to create a realistic test, you need to really look into the game to see how it's communicating with the server, then try to replicate those calls using a tool like Postman. In situations like this, you don’t always know a whole lot about what the web server is supposed to do you just expect to load test it without any context.

She explained that she is often given a scenario - load testing a web server, for instance. It's a really useful tool for both automated and manual testing. The main way she does this is by tweaking the API request to see what comes back. It really helps her to learn what an API does. In Amber’s experience, when she is performing back-end testing she finds herself using Postman more and more to assist her in exploring her team’s APIs. When most folks think of automation they don’t necessarily think of using test automation tools, but that’s a mistake. It also has a postman collections which is an executable API description feature that you should check out. A common example of this is when you send a request to an API and get a response back, you verify that it returns a HTTP 200 OK status, or you make sure that the response contains a certain string in it. Postman chrome plugin and app supports every HTTP method you can think of - including some you might even know about.įor API validation, it has basic checking you can do when you receive the response. That's its basic functionality, but it also has lots of other features built into it like excellent cookie management that can sometimes be hard to manage with other API tools. It allows you to set up all the headers and cookies your API expects, then check the response when it comes back. Postman Chrome is a rest client that started off as a potman chrome extension browser plugin but recently came out with native versions for both Mac and Windows.Īt a high level, you can use it to send a post request to your web server and it gives you the response back. It turns out that most of the testing she needs to perform is a good fit for automation are back-end, API-type tests, and her tool of choice is Postman chrome. I recently interviewed Amber Race, an SDET at Big Fish Games, about how she uses automation to test video games.

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