Gear4music has become one of the largest retailers of musical instruments and equipment in the United Kingdom. I joined the business back in October 2018 as they required a tester with API testing experience for upcoming projects. In this talk, I'll be covering how we went from 0 to 1000+ API tests and how Postman has helped throughout the project's life cycle.I'll also be talking about how I've evolved throughout the years as a Postman user and I'll cover things I wish I knew when I first started.

2. Who are you and where do you work?
@PostmanPaul540
bitbucket.org/Faz540
linkedin.com/in/faz540
medium.com/@faz540

6. Some Of The Games I’ve Worked On:

7. • Launched in 2003, Gear4music is
a leading retailer of musical
instruments and music equipment.
• 25+ Developers and 6 Testers

8. We have an office in Manchester (UK)

9. We have a warehouse and another office
in York (UK)

10. We also have a warehouse in Germany!

11. …And Sweden too!

12. How We Work
at
Gear4music

13. My History With Postman

16. Postman To The Rescue!!

17. • At the time, other than the official
documentation, there was very little
online about Postman

20. Postman at Gear4music

21. “…defects found late in the development cycle
require more time and money to fix. And defects
not found until production are an even bigger
problem. A primary goal of development and
testing teams is to identify defects as early as
possible, reducing the time and cost of rework.”
-
https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/agile-testing-challenges-finding-defects-earl
y/

22. • As data contracts are partially agreed prior to
development, an example response body along
with a JSON schema is provided to use for Dev and
QA.
• This means I can create a Mock Server in Postman
that will return the example response body, thus
enabling me to write basic API tests before the
ticket has even landed in the ‘Ready For QA’
column in JIRA.
• Once the Dev has finished and moved the ticket
into ‘Ready for QA’, I switch the environment in
Postman from the mock server to the Dev
Environment.
• At this point, I can run the same assertions against
the new environment and question any changes
that differ from my expected results.

23. • As JSON schemas are provided upfront, I place them in the “Edit Collection” section under the “Pre-request
Scripts” tab.
• This means they live in one place and can be maintained easily inside Postman.
• Abhisek Jana has a great article on utilising JSON schemas in Postman:
http://www.adeveloperdiary.com/java/webservice/rest/how-to-automate-rest-api-schema-validation-testing-u
sing-postman/

27. • This is the Pre-request Script tab for
our “[A0] Setup” request.
• I use this step in our collection to
clear all environment variables to
remove any persisting data from
previous runs.
• It “nulls” all env variables that are
present in our environment, apart from
the “url” and “auth-token” variables.
• I also create an env variable named
“targetTestSuite” which is null…at
least for now (This becomes important
later)

29. • Remember the“[A0] Setup”
request, we created the env
variable “targetTestSuite”
and we gave it the value
“null”.
• Since it’s null, it means we
use the “default” condition
in the switch statement.
• We’re using the
“setNextRequest” function
to tell Postman to “jump” to
the desired request and
continue the run.
• In this scenario, the
“setNextRequest” is
redundant as the test run
would naturally go to that
request anyway (But I’ve left
it in for consistency)

31. • Now that we’ve reached the
end of the [A1] sub-folder,
we’re using
“setNextRequest” to tell
Postman to “jump back” to
the “Get Orders” request in
the previous sub-folder [A0].
• We’ve also set the
“targetTestSuite” to the
value “Overdue”, this will be
used in the switch statement

33. • Now that “targetTestSuite: is
set to “Overdue”, this means
it’ll execute the code inside
the “Overdue” case.
• We are using
“setNextRequest” to go to
our [A2] sub-folder now.
• If we didn’t use
“setNextRequest” it would
naturally call the next
request in the sequence,
which would be the requests
in [A1].
• We’re now ignoring [A1] and
“jumping” to [A2] once our
Return record has been
created.

41. Thank You!!
@PostmanPaul540
bitbucket.org/Faz540
linkedin.com/in/faz540
medium.com/@faz540