Every company developing a product should have tests in place. Just like it’s important to have tests in place, it also matters how we run these tests. An increasing number of such companies are resorting to testing automation to ship out a bug-free product faster.
In this blog, we will attempt to draw a comparison between Postman and HyperTest to try and understand which is more powerful when it comes to catching API failures.
The Hardest Thing About Test Automation
Writing your own tests on Postman comes with the added responsibility of maintenance. What this means is that every small to large change will need all hand-written tests to be updated on Postman for each time and every sprint.
In a fast-paced environment, code changes happen every day because the codebase is very agile. This means a disproportionate increase in maintenance effort because even a single line of code change could require multiple lines of an update on your postman tests.
If writing tests was not hard enough, how about assertions. The biggest problem with hand-written tests on Postman is to think about which business rules to assert and if you have covered them all. Phew, this needs a genius!
Teams that are working with Postman, split their time thinking about all the flows that can be automated, the assertions within them and still worry if they have covered every business rule inside and every possible workflow with these tests.
Tests automation built with Postman neither gives you the complete confidence of never missing bugs to production nor reduces your effort on test maintenance. Moreover, Postman users are unable to reuse their pre-written scripts or add more requests because of low script reusability. This means testers have to create new test scripts over and over for each project.
In comparison to Postman, an automation tool created for API testing can aid QA teams in various ways when dealing with complicated and in-depth API tests. The benefit of well-structured test collections and frameworks is one of them. When it comes to finding and arranging test cases, it saves users time and effort. The nature of Postman becomes an impediment to cross-functional collaboration in Agile teams where every member must keep close communication with each other.
How Testing Can be the Way it Should Always be
HyperTest will auto-generate an end-to-end test case that you have to otherwise put together one by one in a Postman.
Imagine a sequence of 10 API requests, one after the other that make up your test case. On Postman, you would have to build something called a collection where you put these API requests in the right sequence and with the right data. Whereas on HyperTest, you can have this collection or sequence auto-generated (with the data) just from network traffic.
The maintenance on HyperTest generated tests is ZERO. Not only does it generate a request-by-request collection like Postman in seconds, but these tests are also updated by themselves without any manual input.
And the best part about HyperTest is zero effort on assertions. HyperTest can generate assertions dynamically at the run-time ie. time of execution by comparing your test version (branch) with the stable version (branch). It asserts everything on the response, without any moderation, and intelligently figures out which of the breaking assertions can become errors and which are benign. No headache or worry thinking about assertions ever. How cool!
Summary
To wrap up, HyperTest needs little to no maintenance vs Postman tests. HyperTest can cover the application more extensively through network traffic as compared to Postman and ends up detecting more bugs through dynamic assertions that are deep and wide.
So in a nutshell, migrating from Postman to HyperTest for all your API automation needs can mean:
Spending way less time building or maintaining test automation
Catching way more bugs or issues without ever writing a single line of code
Sleeping like a baby before every release, knowing no major error can ever leak into production
If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a call with an implementation specialist to see how HyperTest can help you ship a bug-free product.