Instructions and covered skills
Read each scenario carefully before selecting a response. Focus on what a developer needs to make a successful and predictable API call. Consider accuracy, consistency, and the consequences of ambiguous documentation. Do not rely on assumptions that are not stated in the question. Stay focused and avoid interruptions while completing the assessment. Review your selected responses before submitting.
Key Areas
This assessment covers the practices used to produce dependable API reference documentation. Candidates work with endpoint summaries that state a resource action and expected outcome, then organize request details so developers can distinguish path parameters, query parameters, headers, and request bodies. Strong documentation identifies whether values are required, optional, conditional, or mutually exclusive, while also describing accepted formats, ranges, defaults, and meaningful constraints.
The assessment also addresses authentication, authorization, pagination, filtering, sorting, rate limits, idempotency, versioning, and asynchronous operations. These topics require documentation that explains observable behavior rather than merely naming a feature. For example, a pagination section should clarify how a client obtains the next page, and an idempotency section should explain the effect of repeating a request with the same key.
Response documentation is another central area. Candidates should be able to describe response fields, nested objects, enums, nullable values, timestamps, identifiers, and links between resources. Error documentation should pair HTTP status codes with machine-readable error codes, likely causes, and practical recovery actions. Examples should be syntactically valid, aligned with the documented schema, and safe to copy after replacing clearly marked sample values.
Recommended Preparation
Review API reference pages for REST-style services and compare each endpoint’s purpose, method, path, authentication requirements, inputs, outputs, and errors. Practice turning implementation details into concise developer-facing descriptions. Examine JSON payloads for field types, required properties, allowed values, and relationships between objects. Pay close attention to distinctions such as omitted versus null values, collection versus single-resource responses, and authentication versus authorization failures.
Prepare by reviewing HTTP methods and status codes in realistic integration scenarios. Practice documenting a create operation, an update operation, a search operation, and a paginated list operation. For each one, write a request example, a response example, and several error cases that accurately match the contract. Finally, check for terminology consistency across endpoint names, parameter tables, examples, and error descriptions so that the reference remains reliable as the API evolves.