Postman, a solid addition to your toolbox
November 30, 2021
Postman, a solid addition to your toolbox
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Postman
Postman is our primary API automation testing tool. It is used both by developers and QA engineers. Postman offers a free solution to tackling our test automation needs at a lower level than UI testing. Test cases are added and updated based on application functionality changes, exported and stored in source control, and tests are run as part of an automated regression suite with every feature.
Pros
- Simple and quick to create requests.
- Built in snippets for simple assertion generation.
- Externalizes parameters in environment files to allow simple swapping between development and test environments.
Cons
- The ability to integrate with a 3rd party source control system is frustrating. Needing to export a singular large raw file and store that in source control myself introduces a number of merge conflicts. Postman does offer their own source control system, but this does not allow me to parallelize my test code alongside my development code, and diverges from our development strategy.
- There [are] no elegant means of conditionally executing a particular step. Postman includes the ability to "go to" a request, but this requires looking deep into the implemented test or pre-request code to know that this behavior is present.
- There is no good solution to code reuse. I cannot define a particular request structure and parameterize it for future use. I am forced to replicate requests over and over and modify them all when changes are needed.
- relatively low barrier to entry
- free to use
- good option for developers to contribute to test automation initiatives
- Allowed us to break ground on API automation testing.
- Allowed us to leverage developer resources for testing to compensate for the lack of QA resources
ReadyAPI is a nightmare for source control integration but gives you a huge plethora more tools to create automated tests for APIs. With Visual Studio you can use a unit test framework to create test cases that can instantiate a WebClient class and make API calls. It takes more development-specific knowledge, and the setup is much more involved than the abstraction offered through postman. A postman falls somewhere in the middle, you give up on some things in favor of others.
Do you think Postman delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Postman's feature set?
Yes
Did Postman live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Postman go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Postman again?
Yes
Comments
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