Is It Beneficial For QA To Test Web Services [closed]

Question

1. How to test web services in manual testing?

2. How to test web services in Automation?

3. If user don't test the functionality and only test web services is it beneficial for QA?

4. Is it time consuming or beneficial?

Answer 1

The super-short and blunt answer:

1. It depends on the service.
2. It depends on the service.
3. It depends on the service.
4. It depends on the service.

Now the details.

Manual testing of web services

If the service has a published API you can test it manually with tools like Postman by building requests and inspecting responses. There may be other manual ways to test depending on what the service does and how it accepts input including but not limited to FTP transfers, dropping files into a folder the service reads on a schedule, and so on. Exactly what you do to test a service manually depends a lot on what the service does and how it does it.

Automated testing of web services

The only difference between manually testing web services and automating the testing is that you're using a tool to run the whole test. Exactly how you do that depends on what the service does and how it does it. Some tools will handle specific types of service more gracefully than others: tools designed for RESTful services will not work as well with SOAP service, and vice versa.

If only web services and not functionality is tested

How effective testing only the web services and not the end to end functionality is depends a lot on the service. If the service is a publicly facing API that others interact with, there may not be a need to test anything else. If it's part of an integrated system, end-to-end testing may be essential.

Is it time consuming or beneficial?

Yes. Web service testing is just like any other testing. It can be time consuming or beneficial, neither, or both depending on what kind of tests are run and what information they surface.