It is amazing how an education of just one day can make such a world of difference. Indeed, in terms of providing insight into a tool like letter carrier and other SoapUIs, this is not very long. Such tools can be used daily for a year only to find that you are not actually taking advantage of all the opportunities available to you.

Letter carrier is a tool that allows you to design and mock APIs, debug, test, monitor and publish. When I started at M2Q, I had never been exposed to it before. As a software tester, however, it is almost impossible not to end up encountering it. So too in my case. After some reading up, I thought I had a vague understanding of exactly what it entailed. The first use, however, was not easy.

I was tasked with testing a number of things using Postman and had hardly any idea how to get started. Bravely, I installed the tool and imported the – fortunately – pre-existing collection. Which meant that I did not have to build the necessary calls myself; however, this made me actually not know what I was doing. If all went well and with some help from a developer left or right, I got the first tickets tested. Unfortunately, the ideal world does not exist! Errors everywhere and no idea how to solve them!

Although it was improving, redemption came via an internal training from M2Q, one on how to use SoapUI. Very similar to Postman. After this training, testing at Postman’s hand became almost a blessing. I had a much better understanding of what I was doing, and in addition, I had also gained a foundation in writing the calls and interpreting and resolving possible errors.

Now I often solve not only my own problems, but also those of others when it comes to Postman. Similarly, because API testing is gaining more and more prominence within the project where I work. Better I am able to understand the data in the request as well as in the response. To then compare it with the documented expectation in the form of, XML, XSD or tables. In this way, we have managed to detect problems early on a number of occasions, sometimes even before we had even started on the Front-End. Just by checking what the Back-End sent.

Looking back now at how I viewed Postman the first time I opened it…. Then I hoped to have as little to do with it as possible. Having trained at M2Q, I am happy to open Postman these days!

Author: Matthias Ingelbrecht