Finding bugs in an API

Finding bugs can be easy. Sometimes they just jump right out at you. However, the easy-to-find bugs aren’t the only ones that matter. Good testers are those who can find all the bugs that matter.

Doing this is often difficult and takes some practice. In this chapter, I will help you to get started with creating good automated tests, but before going deep into that, you should get some practice in the skill of looking for bugs. In this section, I will help you to set up an API locally that you can use for testing.

I will then show you how to do some testing and exploration of this API and help you find some bugs in it. I will also show you the steps to find one specific bug in the system so that you can get a bit of an idea of how to go about doing this for yourself. Let’s dive into this by setting up the API that you are going to test.

Setting up an API for testing

There are a lot of sites that you can practice calling an API on...