How Postman uses Postman: E2E testing, feedback loops, and collaboration
We love hearing from our community about how you’re using Postman to improve your API development experience—it truly continues to inspire us. But have you ever wondered how we might be using Postman internally as we’re building the Postman API Platform and optimizing our own workflows? In this first post of our new series, “How Postman uses Postman,” we’re taking a look inside one of our engineering teams to see how they’re using Postman to build Postman.
Today, we’re chatting with Postman Senior Engineer Divyanshu Singh, of the Workspaces squad. Divyanshu is based in Bangalore, India.
Divyanshu, what do you do at Postman?
I’m a senior engineer at Postman. I’ve been here for four and a half years, and I’ve seen the organization grow massively in terms of the product as well as the company. I work closely with the engineering team of our developer product vertical and am part of the Workspaces squad.
What were you doing before you joined Postman?
Luckily, Postman was my first job straight out of engineering college at Manipal Institute of Technology. So I was studying engineering before this.
Getting to know the Workspaces squad
What does your team do?
When my team started over four years ago, it was called the Collaboration squad. We aim to enable more seamless collaboration in a variety of ways. This includes our users’ real-time presence, their commenting experience across Postman, the activity feed of various parts of Postman, and, most importantly, the heart and soul of Postman—Postman Workspaces.
Do you have any fun stories about your team?
Our team began with just two people. We had a running joke that we kept playing chess while dividing up work during initiatives. Then we gradually increased our team’s head count to four people. And that’s when we converted this analogy from chess to a carrom board! In the last 1.5 years, we’ve scaled the team to 11 folks, and it’s been a great journey.
How the Workspaces squad uses Postman
Exactly how does your team use Postman while working on Postman?
We have been leveraging Postman for tons of engineering workflows. Some of the most important ones are:
- End-to-end testing: We implemented an end-to-end testing structure with the use of Postman Collections, test scripts, and scheduled monitors. We have this structure set up for each of our microservices, which runs every six hours. Apart from this, we also have hooks defined to make sure they are run on each deployment for our staging and production environments. This has helped us identify various issues being shipped before they reach our users. It has also helped us gain confidence in shipping things without the fear of breaking workflows.
- Postman Collections: We keep Postman Collections as a reference and source of truth for what is available through our various microservices. All our endpoints are present in these collections with the right set of examples. This helps any new engineer onboard to the service super quickly.
- CI/CD: We set up contract tests on various microservices with the use of Newman, Postman Collections, and mocks in our CI/CD pipelines. This makes sure that with each commit, we ensure that we are not breaking any consumer-facing contracts.
- Comments: We use comments as a feedback mechanism in the early stages of API development. This creates a feedback loop between the producer and the consumer early on in the development cycle, which leads to less back and forth between the producer and consumer.
- Version control: We use features like fork and merge, along with pull requests, to make any new changes to the current system. The workflow that our team follows is to create a fork from the original collection, make new changes, raise a PR, get it reviewed, and get feedback through comments.
- Watching: We also use the watch functionality on workspaces and collections so that we’re notified of any relevant changes made to the elements of our interest.
Was your team’s internal use of Postman a remedy for one-off challenges, or have you implemented it as an ongoing practice?
No, these are not one-off challenges we solved but better practices our team now follows. We are trying to cultivate an API-first culture within the team, and these are the foundational stepping stones for that.
How did you (or your manager) get team buy-in for implementing these practices?
Getting the team’s buy-in was pretty easy, as everyone has a deep focus on the quality of the product, and having testing automated with our microservices gave everyone confidence about the changes we were shipping.
What Divyanshu has learned from using Postman
What’s something you’ve worked on recently?
I’ve been working on optimizing our DocumentDB performance and cost optimization over the past few months, where we were able to bring performance up by 35% and cost down by around 50%.
What are your favorite productivity tips for working with Postman?
Do explore the shortcuts for Postman—they can be a game changer. Use Postbot to write test scripts and pre-request scripts, which can save a ton of time.
More about Divyanshu
Without revealing any secrets, what’s something you’re excited about working on or exploring for the future of Postman?
Having scaled products from 0-1 and validated them within Postman, I’m really excited about scaling these products from 10-100 and solving for the challenges that come with this new level of scale, especially engineering ones. Also, making workspaces even more seamlessly collaborative, where more value is provided to the users as they have the best multiplayer experience.
Do you have any hobbies outside of work that you want to share?
I’m an avid runner and into racquet sports (tennis and badminton) and strength training. I’m also really into different types of coffee and am always ready to grab a freshly brewed cup.
The bottom line
Divyanshu and the rest of the Workspaces squad focus on Postman’s built-in collaboration features—including commenting, the activity feed, and, of course, workspaces. By making extensive use of Postman’s collaboration tools within their own team, the squad has achieved some major milestones along their API-first development journey.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience, Divyanshu!
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