EnergyCap and Modern QA Testing

EnergyCap is a leading provider of energy management and energy accounting software. They have products for everyone from the Fortune 1000 to individuals and help with cost avoidance, charge backs, etc. and communicating with Accounting and Processing.

Having been around since the 1980s, they are constantly revamping their products to be based on modern software development. They have team of 12 developers supported by 2 QA leads, Jared Matthews and Ann Denner. They are currently redoing the app for a better interface and to open up the API to customers. As they’ve found, Postman has proved critical to the process.

Initially the team used Fiddler. However, as they moved more towards a microservices based architecture, the number of APIs increased. And with that the complexity in QA did as well. They needed to collaboratively write tests, document them, and automate as much as possible. The Postman testing suite with Newman, the command line tool, and Postman’s organizational ability with collections and saved requests, etc. made it the right choice for them.

Because Newman is open sourced, Jared was able to write a C# console that auto runs tests in Newman, parses the results and populates their JIRA tickets.

The EnergyCap QA team has been able to utilize Postman to bring the whole company in the same step with their APIs. They’ve given the tech and sales support staff collections to onboard new customers’ data quickly. Project managers run Newman with excel data files to create new customers, enter bills, etc. using a suite Jared wrote for them. The QA team uses Cloud to collaborate on writing tests and then sharing them with the tech team. The engineers help write tests as needed and are also on the same page when test results are shared. By binding the company together with Postman, the QA team has become the API guru for the organization of 43 people.

According to Ann,

“Using Postman has resulting in reducing a week’s worth of regression testing work to one to two days doable by two people instead of seven or more.”

In the past QA required external help for testing and it would take a full week to clear a feature. Now, creating the tests takes them a few hours. Then they run them over and over until they are error free. In Jared’s happy words,

“Postman has supercharged our regression testing. We would have never caught some of the bugs we did if we did not have the testing suite set up.”

Postman has helped streamline all of EnergyCap’s API efforts. Engineering, to QA, to support, to project management, all are benefitting from it. In their words,

“Any company that works with APIs and wants to be efficient and lean needs this product.”