As it turned out, the Granite Assets REST API bundle was not active. There was a dependency issue on a certain Adobe-bundle.

Great suggestions! But nothing came out of the preliminary investigations.

As it turns out, it is also failing when we give our user "Administrators" permissions. This issue is being followed up at Adobe Case #E-001575531.

As I mentioned in the description, the user can do it via the UI. It only fails on the Assets API, so your suggestion is not relevant.

I have a user that can perform CRUD operations via the UI.He is inside the OOTB Contributors group and has permissions for a specific dam path: `/content/dam/data`, where he can create, read, update and delete Content Fragments.  When this same user tries to perform CRUD operations over the Assets A...

Add this profile to your Maven setup.<profile> <id>autoInstallPackageAuthorAndPublish</id> <activation> <activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault> </activation> <build> <pluginManagement> <plugins> ...

It servers the purpose of tests that are executed on a running AEM instance, as opposed to Unit Tests with Mockito (or another framework) in a mock AEM context. e.g. https://github.com/sneakybeaky/AEM-Integration-Test-Example