Postman is one of the most popular tools used in API testing. It is renowned for being the most effective while working with APIs. The fascinating fact about Postman is that it is used by more than 6 Million developers and 2 lakh companies around the globe. When it comes to API testing tools, there are several tools in the market. This makes it more challenging to make a purchase decision. But, Postman makes it easy by giving you the top 6 reasons why you should consider Postman for API testing
What is API? And Why API testing is important?
API or Application Programming Interface enables communication between three layers; the presentation layer, business layer, and database layer. The business layer contains the logic that lets the user retrieve data from the database. This layer is also known as an API layer that touches both the other layers to make things meaningful. So, developers do frequent API testing for quality assurance. As you know the importance of API testing in web development, let’s find out what makes Postman the best tool to perform this testing.
What is Postman?
It officially defines itself as
“ The collaboration software for API development that simplifies API building and testing by streamlining collaboration.”
Postman’s Best Features
1. API Client feature lets you send REST, SOAP, and GraphQL requests directly quickly within Postman.
2. Ensures safe automation and integration of manual tests that guarantee no code breaks.
3. Enables you to design and mock the responses of an API without having to set up a backend server.
4. Machine-readable documentation.
5. Monitor the API performance and response times at regular intervals.
6. The built-in version control lets you share and collaborate in real-time.
The Stackshare says that Postman is the only complete API environment with many users and is being used by major companies like Microsoft, Swaft.io and Type form for API testing. To review an API testing tool, one should consider the following basic factors of the tool.
6 Factors to consider when choosing the right tool for API testing.
1. Automate Testing
Choose a versatile API tool that can automate functional testing, unit testing, and load testing.
Postman lets you automate API testing and integrate it into your CI/CD pipeline. You can automate many tests such as unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, functional tests, mock tests, end-to-end tests, etc to throttle up testing as well as to avoid human errors.
2. Platform and OS Compatibility
An ideal API testing tool should support most of the applications and platforms. It is important to consider your current and future project requirements.
The Postman app is available on macOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome. It supports the minimum macOS 10.10 version(Yosemite). Works for Windows 7 and later, and Windows for ARM devices is possible by using the ia32 binary. In the Linux platform, Ubuntu 12.04 and newer, Fedora 21 and Debian 8. It supports many authentication mechanisms like Basic auth, Oauth, Oauth2, Jwt, etc.
3. Test reports
Postman test reports give you the track data that is sent through the request builder only. One cannot track the data sent through Newman, collection runs and monitors. However, if the test runs fail, it generates reports using Collection runs. You can generate reports in HTML.
4. Technical support
Community support is everything that a developer basically expects from an ideal API testing tool.
Postman holds strong support and community to enhance its usage in various platforms such as Github, Stackoverflow, and social media platforms. Postman Discourse, blogs, roadman and support center are present exclusively for supporting Postman.
5. Integrations
Postman can be integrated with all the top developers’ tools. One can integrate with useful other applications and tools such as APImatic for converting API description formats, Big Panda that resolve alerts, Coralogix, Postman Pro API, Datadog and VictorOps. Most importantly, it can be integrated with Github, Slack, Gitlab, Dropbox, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Flow.
6. Pricing
Being open-source, Postman is free of cost. You can get all of the above benefits for free. There are also paid plans for Postman Pro and Postman Enterprise to suit small to large enterprises.
Up to you!
Postman competes with all the expectations that a developer expects from an API testing tool. Indeed, it gives you more than your expectations. But, It is always better to consider reviewing many API testing tools before choosing one. It is up to your ease of use, project requirements and other factors. Stack share says that ease of use is the reason why developers like Postman.
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The author is Ganapathi M, CEO, Agira Technologies (#agiratech, www.agiratech.com).
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