Test Plan Checklist

Before you call your test suite "complete," run through this checklist. This is the same checklist senior QA engineers use before signing off on API test coverage. If you can check every box, your suite is production-ready.

Functional Coverage

1. All GET endpoints tested — list, single, filtered, nested resources
2. All POST endpoints tested — valid body, verify 201, verify returned data
3. All PUT endpoints tested — full update, verify all fields change
4. All PATCH endpoints tested — partial update, verify unchanged fields preserved
5. All DELETE endpoints tested — verify correct status code (200 or 204)
6. Query parameter filtering tested — userId, page, limit, sort
7. Pagination tested — page 1 vs page 2, total count, per_page
8. Nested resource relationships tested — /posts/1/comments, /users/1/posts

Validation Coverage

1. Status codes validated for every request — not just 200
2. Response body fields validated with specific assertions — not just "not null"
3. JSON Schema validation for every resource type
4. Response time checks — under 2 seconds for normal endpoints
5. Response headers validated — Content-Type: application/json

Negative and Edge Case Coverage

1. Non-existent resource IDs — 404 response
2. Invalid ID formats — zero, negative, string — proper error handling
3. Missing required fields — 400 with meaningful error message
4. Wrong data types — string where number expected
5. Empty request body — handled gracefully
6. Invalid endpoint URL — 404
7. Unauthorized access — 401 (if auth is applicable)
8. Empty filter results — 200 with empty array, not 404

Engineering Quality

1. Tests are independent — no test depends on another test running first
2. Data-driven tests for scenarios with multiple inputs
3. Smoke and regression groups defined
4. Allure annotations — @Epic, @Feature, @Severity on every test
5. Config externalized — base URL in properties file, not hardcoded
6. Tests pass consistently — no flaky tests
7. testng.xml configured with smoke and regression suites
8. Can run against different environments via -Denv flag
9. HTML reports generated — Allure for REST Assured, htmlextra for Newman

Documentation

1. Test plan document in project root
2. README with setup instructions and run commands
3. Postman collection and environment exported as JSON
4. JSON Schema files in resources/schemas/
5. Test data files in resources/testdata/