The Postman Always Delivers

Originally our team had a suite of UI based test automation which we were tasked with expanding and maintaining. We encountered a lot of the typical problems seen with these tests. They were slow to run, brittle, and required significant effort to run across different browsers.

We decided to try to move as many of these tests to run at the API layer instead as was possible. This was followed by experimentation with different programming languages and test frameworks to try to achieve this. Typically we would use Postman to explore the API endpoint, and then create the automation scripts using one of these frameworks along with a rest client.

After doing some research and seeing some blog posts online we had a groundbreaking realisation.. we didn’t require another language or test framework for automation!

We could explore API endpoints using Postman, build up a collection of requests, create tests and then run these directly as part of the CI/CD pipeline.

The more we used Postman the more apparent the true value of the application became. In addition to creating tests, it could be used to add scripts for test setup, manage different environments and perform latency checks for response times.

We also used it for API schema definition, documentation, mocking responses and synthetic monitoring.

In this talk, I will share my learnings, go through some real-life examples from the above experience and describe the impact and benefits of using Postman to accelerate your API automation.