Working with Postman like a boss
If you are a Manual or Automation QA, you probably know and use regularly Postman.
[To see official information: Postman and if you have Udemy account I strongly recommend: Postman the complete guide]
The thing is that you may not know how to use it like a boss, and that is the reason of this article let me tell you how to use Postman like a boss.
In order to make this easy and useful for the ones who read it, I’m going to talk only about those things I considered the top of the iceberg of what you can do with Postman. We can maybe say that they are probably the things that you need or maybe be needed in some future if you are working or expect to work with microservices and APIs, and for sure are the thing I found very cool about Postman.
My short list is :
- Collections
- Environments
- Variables
- Pre-tests and post-tests
- Runner Execution
If you are thinking: wow short list! I have to remind you this is only the top of the iceberg, after taking a look you can learn so much more!
Let’s begin with the most usual thing you will do on Postman: get an URL, copy and click the “Send” button, that will look like :
What you can see here: Simple GET request, an URL, and the response for that request.
That looks pretty simple, but let’s be honest: this is not a big deal and you can do this without Postman. So at that moment we usually move to the next stage: once you have more than 1 request, different parameters, and so on, What you do? Create a collection with multiple requests, so you don’t have to remember an example of each request and you can easily share that collection with whoever you want.
Ok, that is useful but like I used to say: collections are just the first step when you start using Postman. Next thing to talk about is the possibility to have “environments” , if you use some IDE you already know what we mean when talking about “environments”, if you are not a DEV and neither uses an IDE then just think like this: is a place where you want a number of things to be together separate from others. In our case, as a QA we usually have QA, DEV, PROD environments to tests, same we can have here with different values each:
So, what is the difference between each environment? You might say logically that once difference is the URL and you will be right. And how we can set a different value for the endpoint, so we can have the proper value for each environment? Easy peasy Postman provides variables ( yes! Just as we have on an IDE). You can create and modify as many as you want, and you can have them: global or by environment.
Till this point you have something similar as you can do when you work with and IDE, but without using it, you can have this working so much quickly and re use as needed. Now is the moment to think about adding some verifications before or/and after each time you run a request, how you can do it? Postman gives you the possibility to do it very easily:
Finally one of the things I really like about postman, once you have created all the things we previously mention, and you have a collection, variables for the each environment, tests for validations what you probably want next is to be able to populate data for your services, meaning you need to run more than once the same request, and maybe you need them to run in a particular order. And for this you can use the Postman Runner:
Basically, you select which collection you need to run, which environment to use, how many times, and a couple of things more. And after the execution is done, you can see the results like this:
In case you want more :
Postman videos
Udemy course
https://globallogic.udemy.com/postman-the-complete-guide/
Thanks for reading!!
