Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 2)

Summary:  Loops of exploration, experimentation, studying, modeling, and learning are the essence of testing, not an add-on to it. The intersection of activity and models (such as the Heuristic Test Strategy Model) help us to perform testing while continuously developing, refining, and reviewing it. Testing is much more than writing a bunch of automated checks to confirm that the product can do something; it’s an ongoing investigation in which we continuously develop our understanding of the product.

Last time out, I began the process of providing a deep answer to this question:

Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it?

That started with reframing the first question

Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs?

into a different question

Given a product with an API, do you do testing?

The answer was, of course, Yes. This time I’ll turn to addressing the question “How do you do it?” I’ll outline my thought process and the activities that I would perform, and how they feed back on each other.

Note that in Rapid Software Testing, a test is an action performed by a human; neither a specific check nor a scripted test procedure. A test is a burst of exploration and experiments that you perform. As part of that activity, a test include thousands of automated checks within it, or just one, or none at all. Part of the test may be written down, encoded as a specific procedure. Testing might be aided by tools, by documents or other artifacts, or by process models. But the most important part of testing is what testers think and what testers do.

(Note here that when I say “testers” here, I mean any person who is either permanently or temporarily in a testing role. “Tester” applies to a dedicated tester; a solo programmer switching from the building mindset to the tester mindset; or a programmer or DevOps person examining the product in a group without dedicated testers.)

It doesn’t much matter where I start, because neither learning nor testing happen in straight lines. They happen in loops, cycles, epicycles; some long and some short; nested inside each other; like a fractal. Testing and learning entail alternation between focusing and defocusing; some quick flashes of insight, some longer periods of reflection; smooth progress at some times, and frequent stumbling blocks at others. Testing, by nature, is an exploratory process involving conversation, study, experimentation, discovery, investigation that leads to more learning and more testing.

As for anything else I might test, when I’m testing a product through an API, I must develop a strategy. In the Rapid Software Testing namespace, your strategy is the set of ideas that guide the design, development, and selection of your tests.

Having the the Heuristic Test Strategy Model in my head and periodically revisiting it helps me to develop useful ideas about how to cover the product with testing. So as I continue to describe my process, I’ll annotate what I’m describing below with some of the guideword heuristics from the HTSM.
_{The references will look like this.}

A word of caution, though:  the HTSM isn’t a template or a script.  As I’m encountering the project and the product, test ideas are coming to me largely because I’ve internalized them through practice, introspection, review, and feedback.  I might use the HTSM generatively, to help ideas grow if I’m having a momentary drought; I might use it retrospectively as a checklist against which I review and evaluate my strategy and coverage ideas; or I might use it as a means of describing testing work and sharing ideas with other people, as I’m doing here.

Testing the RST way starts with evaluating my context. That starts with taking stock of my mission, and that starts with the person giving me my mission. Who is my client—that is, to whom am I directly answerable? What does my client want me to investigate?

I’m helping someone—my client, developers, or other stakeholders—to evaluate the quality of the product. Often when we think about value, we think about value to paying customers and to end users, but there are plenty of people who might get value from the product, or have that value threatened. Quality is value to some person who matters, so whose values do we know might matter? Who might have been overlooked?
_{Project Environment/Mission}

Before I do anything else, I’ll need to figure out—at least roughly—how much time I’ll have to accomplish the mission. While I’m at it, I’ll ask other time-related questions about the project: are there any deadlines approaching? How often do builds arrive? How much time should I dedicate to preparing reports or other artifacts?
_{Project Environment/Schedule}

Has anyone else tested this product? Who are they? Where are they? Can I talk to them? If not, did they produce results or artifacts that will help me? Am I on a team? What skills do we have? What skills do we need?
_{Project Environment/Test Team}

What does my client want to me to provide? A test report, almost certainly, and bug reports, probably—but in what form? Oral conversations or informally written summaries? I’m biased towards keeping things light, so that I can offer rapid feedback to clients and developers. Would the client prefer more formal appoaches, using particular reporting or management tools? As much as the client might like that, I’ll also note whenever I see costs of formalization.

What else might the client, developers, and other stakeholders want to see, now or later on? Input that I’ve generated for testing? Code for automated checks? Statistical test results? Visualizations of those results? Tools that I’ve crafted and documentation for them? A description of my perception of the product? Formal reports for regulators and auditors?
_{Project Environment/Deliverables}

I’ll continue to review my mission and the desired deliverables throughout the project.

Having checked on my mission, I proceed to simple stuff so that I can start the process of learning about the product. I can start with any one of these things, or with two or more of them in parallel.

So what is this thing I’m about to test? What is there to know?
_{Project Environment/Test Item
Product Elements}

I talk to the developers, if they’re available. Even better, I participate in design and planning sessions for the product, if I can. My job at such meetings is to learn, to advocate for testability, to bring ideas and ask questions about problems and risks. I ask about testing that the developers have done, and the checking that they’ve set up.
_{Project Environment/Developer Relations}

If I’ve been invited to the party late or not at all, I’ll make a note of it. I want to be as helpful as possible, but I also want to keep track of anything that makes my testing harder or slower, so that everyone can learn from that. Maybe I can point out that my testing will be better-informed the earlier and the more easily I can engage with the product, the project, and the team.

I examine the documentation for the API and for the rest of the product.
_{Project Environment/Information}

I want to develop an understanding of the product: the services it offers, the means of controlling it, and its role in the systems that surround it. I annotate the documentation or take separate notes, so that I can remember and discuss my findings later on. As I do so, I pay special attention to things that seem inconsistent or confusing.

If I’m confused, I don’t worry about being confused. I know that some of my confusion will dissipate as I learn about the product. Some of my confusion might suggest that there are things that I need to learn. Some of my confusion might point to the risk that the users of the product will be confused too. Confusion can be a resource, an oracle, and a motivator, as long as I don’t mind being confused for a while.

As I’m reading the documentation, I ask myself “What simple, ordinary, normal things can I do with the product?” If I have the product available, I’ll do sympathetic testing by trying a few basic requests, using a tool that provides direct interaction with the product through its API. Perhaps it’s a tool developed in-house; perhaps it’s a tool crafted for API testing like Postman or SOAPUI; or maybe I’ll use an interpreter like Ruby’s IRB along with some helpful libraries like Net::HTTP or HTTParty.
_{Project Environment/Equipment and Tools}

I might develop a handful of very simple scripts, or I might retain logs that the tool or the interpreter provides. I’m just as likely to throw this stuff away as I am to keep it. At this stage, my focus is on learning more than on developing formal, reusable checks. I’ll know better how to test and check the product after I’ve tried to test it.

If I find a bug—any kind of inconsistency or misbehaviour that threatens the value of the product—I’ll report it right away, but that’s not all I’ll report. If I have any problems with trying to do sympathetic testing, I’ll report them immediately. They may be usability problems, testability problems, or both at once. At this stage of the project, I’ll bias my choices towards the fastest, least expensive, and least formal reporting I can do.

My primary goal at this point, though, is not to find bugs, but to figure out how people might use the API to get access to the product, how they might get value from it, and how that value might be threatened. I’m developing my models of the product; how it’s intended to work, how to use it, and how to test it. Learning about the product in a comprehensive way prepares me to find better bugs—deeper, subtler, less frequent, more damaging.

To help the learning stick, I aspire to be a good researcher: taking notes; creating diagrams; building lists of features, functions, and risks; making mind maps; annotating existing documentation. Periodically I’ll review these artifacts with programmers, managers, or other colleagues, in order to test my learning.

Irrespective of where I’ve started, I’ll iterate and go deeper, testing the product and refining my models and strategies as I go. We’ll look at that in the next exciting installment.