The Many Shades of JSON: Contracts, Webhooks, and Everything in Between

Project Overview

• Objective: Design and implement a robust, scalable, and reusable API automation framework to streamline the testing of RESTful APIs using Python.

• My Role: Automation Engineer and Technical Author

Key Contributions

• Technologies Used: Python, requests, json, unittest, os, and dotenv for environment variable management.

• Project Highlights:

  • Developed a modular and reusable Python-based framework for automated API testing.

  • Integrated best practices including environment variable management, response validation, and test structuring using unittest.

  • Structured the framework to support multiple endpoints and dynamic payload injection, making it scalable across various API use cases.

  • Employed error handling, assertions, and logging to enhance reliability and visibility during test execution.

• Challenges Overcome:

  • Ensured flexibility of the framework for both staging and production environments by leveraging .env files.

  • Solved inconsistencies in JSON payload formatting by dynamically generating input data and using json.dumps() with appropriate headers.

  • Worked around response validation inconsistencies using assertEqual() and custom comparison functions for nested JSON structures.

Outcome and Impact

• Results:

  • Reduced API regression testing time by over 50% during mock deployments.

  • Enhanced code maintainability and readability through well-documented, modular Python scripts.

  • Provided the dev and QA teams with a repeatable testing mechanism that could be easily extended to cover new APIs.