Postman have recently released their huge API report. It gives a long term view on the world of API’s, and includes insights from all Postman users – incredibly over 26,000 of them who responded.
I have previously blogged about a few similar reports, and what they tell me in my role as a software tester:-
What did I learn from the Postman Report?
The Postman report was interesting, because it was aimed at all users of API’s – the majority of whom are developers. You can read the report in full here: https://www.postman.com/state-of-api/#key-findings
Here are my three takeaways:-
Takeaway #1: Postman isn’t just for ad hoc manual testing anymore
Whilst a lot of people do still use Postman for ad hoc/exploratory testing – and as Amber Race’s seminal Test Automation University course shows, it is brilliant for that – its now clear that automating API’s isn’t seen as an edge case or extreme thing anymore. Among all respondents, 11% of time was spent on automation, but amongst Quality Engineers it was a whopping 31%. This also adds weight to the assumption that testers are responsible for automated testing in the majority of organisations, something which the other reports (mentioned above) seem to back up.
Takeaway #2: Its a man’s world
I’ll just leave this here….
Now, this might seem high to you, but its actually double the number of women who responded to the Stackoverflow 2021 Deveoper Survey.
There is clearly an issue here which is tech-wide, and bigger than one company to fix. But in fairness, I think Postman do a great job at encouraging female voices to be heard, and I look forward to seeing how they seek to chip away at this imbalance in future. (*whispers* It’s actually my next career ambition to present f2f at a non-UK conference, maybe Postman Galaxy would be a good way to pop that particular cherry? 🧐#justPuttinThatOutToTheUniverse)
Takeaway #3: Remote Working Isn’t Going Anywhere
This is one of those responses that asks more questions than it answers – I’m intrigued! It’s really interesting to me, because with 26000 replies its probably one of the most accurate bellwethers we have for tech as a whole in relation to this issue – most companies have API’s now, so its safe to assume the companies we work for fall into these categories.
I guess I would have liked to reverse the question to find out if the respondents expected to go into the office every day or at least one or more days per week (as opposed to working from home during that time). There is a big difference between being fully remote and going into the office 4 out of 5 days. It wasn’t the focus of the survey, but I’d also love to know how keen the respondents were to go into the office/work from home – my personal experience is that the younger (and often more inexperienced) folks prefer the occasional office day as its easier for them to pick up things, but its a jump to assume that’s what these Gen Z-ers thought.
In Summary
I’d recommend taking a squiz through the survey yourself – it is super easy to absorb (props to whoever put those graphics together). Its pretty clear that API’s aren’t going anywhere, are truly a global thing, and that Postman is by far the most popular tool in the market.
If you want to learn more about the features of the Postman platform, take a look at my free Test Automation University course.
T’ra for now!
Beth The Tester's Tales 