Testing the purchase API
Modern websites have started to include public API endpoints. These are used as a communication portal between native mobile phone applications and the core website, amongst other things. Many companies build their whole business on providing a public API. Testing the publicly accessible API is just as critical as testing the main website. After all, if the API breaks, than all of the third-party applications that consume it will stop working, thus preventing users from giving us money.
Our website provides several public API endpoints to allow third-party integration. One of these endpoints allows the purchase of a given product. By sending a POST request with some customer information, we can purchase products from a mobile phone app or a web portal embedded on some other website.
We have several options when it comes to testing our API. For example, we can write a simple shell script that will make a curl or wget request against the API endpoint and perform a simple...
