Welcome! In this post I'd like to share my experience regarding to postman challenge for developers and advice to get it or not 🙂
Introduction
I know pretty much about postman and I worked a lot with it. I can say that I used not only basic features but have been writing complicated scenarios like any language automation stuff. All my tests with postman are usually flexible, parameterized and decoupled from the implementation layer like the environment under testing. And this is what I learned from this challenge.
Challenge structure
Pretty simple. All you need is a postman account and create a public workspace as you need to fork the “template” collections and then work there. Every day the postman team provides to you a task that is estimated to take 20-45 minutes and I can believe it assuming you’re new to postman.
Every task contains several tests to verify yourself and make fixes if required so this is great, but the error message if you’re failing the test is not so informative and sometimes I had to look into the test script to understand what exactly is wrong in my solution. This was not annoying at all but if you’re new to postman… I Think, you got my point
Challenges
First several days the postman team tries to explain the basic concepts of postman like how to fork collection, what is the request and environments, how you can make your data reusable by providing variables, authorization flow in postman. This is pretty easy to finish and kinda obvious as postman (in my opinion) has a convenient interface.
Then you’ll be learning how to write and debug tests, run collections sharing response data within. These skills are crucial for working with postman and creating tests as we’re preparing a robust base to run our tests in CI/CD (or locally 🙂).
After this part is done you’re making acquaintance with the postman features like mock server, monitoring tool. In these exercises I learned something new, thanks for that.
Newman. I’m not sure why this lesson is not right after the collections running lesson. Anyway, if you want to store your collections with tests in a repository and run it with the CI/CD pipelines on a daily basis, this tool is a must have.
The OAuth lesson is about getting familiar with various services and how to handle OAuth authorization using Github. I think this example is nice to have for the case you forget how to implement it 🙂
Next bunch of tasks is for a specific purpose but I think every QA guy has faced it at least once. So postman team teaches us to write the logs (all responses to a file), to implement pagination for endpoints, to visualize the data (this feature I haven’t aware of allows us to show the response data in HTML format, to represent it in readable way, wow), work with API specification, GraphQL requests and request documentation.
And, finally, we’re learning to handle WebSockets, parse HTML responses, use data files for huge amounts of tests, testing the scenarios. The UI testing folder is also included but I’d like to say this is not UI testing in common understanding (clicking elements, fill out the input fields etc) but mostly about performance testing using the special web service for it.
Conclusions
Regarding my technical expectations - this challenge is a good point to start learning postman with. It contains all the lessons for every day work and all the crucial skills you need to implement postman automation from scratch. Great job!
Regarding new knowledge I got - yes, I would recommend this challenge. If you think you know a postman from A to Z, then just try it. I was pretty sure I would not learn anything new, but I’ve mistaken.
In general, I have fun finishing it and getting my badge so I can say I recommend completing it, no matter if you're a novice or expert.
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And don't stop to automate!
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