Overview
If you are into quality assurance automation engineering or software testing, you have heard about Rest Assured and Postman. The QA engineers use these to perform API testing and web service testing. Both these tools are very popular and powerful when it comes to testing automation of software applications. Rest Assured is used to verify the REST APIs with the help of the Java library.
Rest Assured uses the Java library as a headless client to act upon Rest’s web services. The Postman API testing tool provides a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for creating, managing, and executing API tests. Both these tools have their features and capabilities for generating reports and logs of test automation. A test report and log is a document that provides a summary of the testing activities and results for a particular software application. These reports and logs contain various types of test details, such as test cases executed, test results, test environment, bugs encountered, and any other relevant data. I
In this article, you will first see a brief introduction to Rest Assured and Postman and then how you can generate reports and logs using Rest Assured and Postman in test automation.
What is Rest Assured?
Rest Assured is a library based on the Java programming language. This library is designed for API testing purposes. Rest Assured allows the software application developers to perform domain-specific (SDL) for your software test automation. Also, you can easily integrate the Rest Assured with Java Projects. Rest Assured allows the developer to control the testing process flexibly, thus, it helps manage complex test scenarios.
The integration capability of Rest Assured is also worth choosing for test automation. It allows the developers to choose a range of IDE for its use. Some popular Java IDEs that support Rest Assured are Eclipse and IntelliJ. This allows the developers to write test scenarios, manage, and execute them directly from their development environments, making integrating test automation into the overall software development process easier.
There are also some other advantages of using Rest Assured, such as it being easily automated and integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. By incorporating API testing into the automated testing process, all the stakeholders can achieve faster feedback and ensure continuous testing for enhanced and quality software applications. Executing parallel or distributed test automation using Rest Assured is harder than using Postman.
What is Postman?
Postman is a very extensively used API testing tool. It allows software developers to create, manage, and execute tests for software applications using GUI (Graphical User Interface). It provides many useful features and functionality that help make your test automation of software efficient and productive. Postman offers the developer various options, like defining environments and variables. Environments help the testers switch between different configurations for testing various software application environments, such as development, staging, or production.
Variables are virtual storage used to store dynamic values and reuse them across multiple requests, which helps ease test case maintenance. Postman has a shared environment that allows all the stakeholders to share their insights on the project. They can share and manage the access limits individually for all the team members. Apart from this, Postman also has a mock server feature. Basically, a mock server allows the tester to simulate API response without connecting to the real backend.
You can perform API documentation in Postman, which provides several useful features like documenting API endpoints, request methods, expected parameters, and sample responses. The developers can ensure a better understanding and utilization of their APIs by other team members or third-party developers. Executing parallel or distributed test automation using Postman is harder than Rest Assured.
Rest Assured Reports and Logs
As we know, Rest Assured is a Java-based library that is very helpful in generating reports and logs of your test automation process. It allows the developer to write fluent and expressive code for testing APIs. Rest Assured can be easily integrated with famous and useful software application testing frameworks and tools such as TestNG or JUnit. These frameworks help the developers to generate HTML or XML reports. They can efficiently generate reports and logs of the test automation of software and web applications.
One more library can be used to generate reports and logs with Rest Assured. The name of this library is ExtentReports library. It helps the developer make more creative, easy-to-understand, representative reports and logs for test automation. This library provides various features to generate the reports and logs of test automation, such as screenshots, graphs, charts, etc. It makes the report and logs more creative and easy to understand by all the stakeholders.
Rest Assured also supports the logging mechanism feature. Rest Assured feature helps print the request and response details on the console. Also, you can print the reports and logs in a file. You can configure the logging level and format using various methods such as the given(), when(), and then() methods.
Postman Reports and Logs
Postman is another useful platform that can be used to generate reports and logs for test automation of the software application process. Postman is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based application that helps software developers design, run, and document APIs. The Postman application has a built-in feature named “Postman Reports”. This feature of Postman allows the developers to generate the reports and logs of your collections, folders, or requests of the test automation.
Various components of Postman are used for different purposes and meet the test automation requirements and needs. Some of the useful components are like a dashboard. It can easily access the generated reports from the web dashboard. Also, you can export these reports as a text or pdf file. A Postman window console is used to manage request and response details of the test automation.
This window console also shows errors or warnings when generating the reports and logs. To open the console, click the “Console” button at the bottom left of the Postman window or use the keyboard shortcut (Cmd/Ctrl + Alt + C). If you want to use the pm.test() function to write assertions and log messages in your test script of test automation.
Benefits of Reports and Logs
Generating reports and logs in the test automation process has many important benefits. It does not matter what tool or framework you choose to perform your test automation, but generating logs and reports is helpful in software development. It helps verify the success and failure of your tests and identify the root cause of any error or mistake in the test automation.
Apart from this, reports and logs also help document your API tests; you can share them with all the other team members and stakeholders. Using these reports and logs of software test automation, you can do data analysis that helps to measure the software testing performance, quality, and testing coverage, as well as troubleshoot and resolve errors or bugs in your API or code.
Reports and logs play a crucial role in testing, providing valuable insights into the performance, health, and issues encountered during test executions. Cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest, with their comprehensive reporting and logging features, offer several benefits to testing teams.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
- Visibility and Transparency: Reports and logs in LambdaTest offer clear visibility into test executions, allowing testing teams, developers, and stakeholders to understand the status and outcomes of tests.
- Issue Identification and Debugging: Detailed reports and logs assist in identifying and debugging issues effectively. When a test fails, the logs provide specific information about the point of failure, enabling swift issue resolution.
- Root Cause Analysis: Reports and logs help analyze the root cause for failed tests. Testing teams can trace back through the logs to understand the sequence of events leading to a failure, facilitating targeted problem-solving.
- Performance Analysis: Reports generated by LambdaTest include performance-related metrics and insights. This aids in analyzing the application’s performance under test, identifying potential bottlenecks, and optimizing for speed and efficiency.
- Trend Analysis: Over time, accumulated reports and logs allow for trend analysis. Teams can identify patterns, recurring issues, and areas of improvement, contributing to the overall enhancement of testing processes.
- Documentation and Compliance: Reports document test executions, providing a record of tests conducted, their outcomes, and any issues encountered. This documentation is valuable for compliance purposes and audit trails.
- Screenshots for Visual Validation: LambdaTest reports often include screenshots of the application at various steps during test execution. This visual validation aids in quickly identifying UI-related issues and provides a tangible record of how the application appeared during testing.
- Collaboration and Communication: Reports act as a communication tool between testing teams, development teams, and other stakeholders. They provide a common ground for understanding the status of the application, promoting collaboration and effective communication.
- Continuous Improvement: Analyzing reports and logs allows teams to identify areas for improvement in testing strategies, automation scripts, and overall test processes. This contributes to a culture of continuous improvement within the testing lifecycle.
- Customization and Flexibility: LambdaTest allows for customization of reports, tailoring them to specific project requirements. This flexibility ensures that teams can focus on the metrics and information most relevant to their testing goals.
- Integration with CI/CD Pipelines: LambdaTest reports seamlessly integrate with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This integration ensures that test results are part of the automated deployment process, providing rapid feedback for development cycles.
In summary, reports and logs in LambdaTest are indispensable tools for ensuring the success and effectiveness of the testing process. They not only provide a detailed account of test executions but also contribute to informed decision-making, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the testing ecosystem.
Conclusion
A test report and log provide various test automation details such as test cases executed, test results, test environment, bugs encountered, and other relevant data. Regarding generating reports and logs of test automation, two popular names are Rest Assured and Postman. Rest Assured is a library designed for API testing purposes, and it allows the software application developers to perform domain-specific (SDL) tasks for your software test automation. The libraries based on the Rest Assured library are also used to validate the HTTP responses from the server.
You can also integrate it with build tools like Maven and unit test frameworks like JUnit and TestNG. Postman is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based API testing tool that helps to generate reports and logs. The developers can switch between different configurations for testing various environments to execute software test automation and generate reports and logs. Hope you get an idea of how you can generate reports and logs using Rest Assured and Postman.