I'm involved in the Django rest framework based project. Django and DRF are fantastic - I heavily cover complicated parts of my code with unit tests, using built-in DRF and Django testing tools. We also have a QA team in my project. The team is using pytest to test the developed API. QAs don't know Django or DRF. They just treat the API as a balckbox and don't rely on any Django tools.
I looked at their code once and saw how much work is being done on their side. Most of the time they test not my code, but rather they test Django functionality. We have CRUD for complicated models. It's so easy for me to create CRUD with DRF, since I have most of the tools bult-in, while testers create models for various requests and responses and it's really complicated on their side. When it comes to authentication, they have fancy fixtures, while i use 'force_authenticate'... In the end their code looks more complicated than mine.
My question: is it really helpful to test DRF API externally, provided it's already covered with many unittests?
