ChargeHub Boosts Developer Productivity and API Quality with Postman

ChargeHub is a service that makes it easy for drivers and data partners to locate nearly all 120,000+ public EV charging points across North America. The company aggregates real-time data from third-party providers and its community of drivers, which it then makes available to drivers through its mobile and web apps. ChargeHub's API is also featured in mapping products, in-car entertainment systems, and elsewhere. The company recently launched ChargeHub Passport, an app that allows drivers to use multiple charging networks. ChargeHub is an essential service for thousands of consumers, and strict SLAs govern API availability to partners.

ChargeHub, a service that helps drivers locate over 120,000 public EV charging points across North America, faced a significant challenge in maintaining its always-on platform. The company aggregates real-time data from third-party providers and its community of drivers, which it then makes available to drivers through its mobile and web apps. ChargeHub's API is also featured in mapping products, in-car entertainment systems, and elsewhere. The company recently launched ChargeHub Passport, an app that allows drivers to use multiple charging networks. With thousands of consumers relying on ChargeHub and strict SLAs governing API availability to partners, there was no room for downtime or inaccurate data. The challenge for ChargeHub's agile engineering teams was to maintain high-quality standards without compromising productivity. They identified handover between teams as a particularly risky moment in their development lifecycle, with ad hoc methods of teaching and learning APIs damaging both productivity and code quality.

ChargeHub's solution was to put Postman at the center of their development process. They standardized on Postman Collections as the way to manage API assets, making handover between teams a simple matter of providing access to the relevant Postman Collection. This gave the implementing team access to documentation, ready-to-run tests, and pre-configured environments. The ChargeHub team also integrated Postman's command-line tool, Newman, into their CI pipeline. Each time new code was merged into ChargeHub's main branch, the CI pipeline triggered Newman to run the appropriate integration and regression tests in Postman. This ensured that test failures were caught before a potential problem entered production. ChargeHub also used Postman API monitors to provide instant alerts of API availability issues and a detailed dashboard to track performance over time. They reduced the complexity of working with disparate standards from multiple data sources by creating a Postman Collection for each external API.

• Integrating Postman into their development workflow has had a profound impact on ChargeHub's ability to deliver new functionality for its community of drivers and its partners. Handover between teams has become smoother and more efficient, with Postman enabling engineers to learn new internal APIs autonomously. Using Postman as the standard interface to external APIs has reduced the overhead of context switching between different data delivery methods and access patterns. Automated testing, enhanced through an integration with ChargeHub's CI pipeline, has boosted developer motivation by removing the need for manual testing. Postman API monitors give the ChargeHub team peace of mind that their APIs are serving both their partners and their own consumer apps at peak performance around the clock. The future for ChargeHub continues to be bright, with plans to surface their functionality in more places. Postman is at the heart of those plans, as the company next works to improve internal discovery with a directory of endpoints in a Private API Network.

• 3x increase in developer productivity

• Single workflow for internal and external APIs

• Improved productivity and quality through CI integration