Youi's Automation of 2,700+ Test Runs per Deployment Using Postman

Youi is an insurance company based in Australia. It offers insurance solutions for consumers and small businesses, with a range of products that cover vehicles, watercraft, homes, business premises, product liability, and more. The company specializes in tailoring solutions to each customer's unique needs. Youi's engineering organization maintains a broad portfolio of over 100 disparate APIs, some of which are used to integrate with third-party systems, while others interact with Youi's core insurance platform. As they migrate to a microservices architecture, Youi's engineers are regularly building new APIs to communicate between services, as well as to migrate parts of the platform incrementally using the Strangler Pattern.

Youi, an Australian insurance company, faced a significant challenge in managing and testing its vast portfolio of over 100 APIs. The company's Communications team, responsible for the APIs that run Youi's email templating engine, found their previous testing methods slow and cumbersome. They would manually test endpoints or write integration and unit tests in .NET to execute endpoints. Additionally, they had a legacy system for generating documents that was not tied to automated testing. This posed a risk of introducing regression issues whenever documents changed or new ones were added. The process change at Youi happened organically, with a few developers and QA analysts starting to use Postman in 2016. As its usage grew, Postman became the dominant API testing tool for two-thirds of the organization.

Postman provided a fast and effective way for the Communications team at Youi to test and validate their email templating APIs. They created a dedicated Postman workspace for internal collaboration, which gave everyone easy access to Postman Collections containing API endpoints and testing workflows. Initially, developers would formulate a request on Postman, send it, and visually check the responses. As Postman became more integral to their work, the team formalized their workflows. Developers now fork a collection and use Postman's version control feature to work locally and run tests against a local branch before merging it back into the main collection. The team automated testing by integrating Newman, Postman's command-line collection runner, into their CI pipeline as part of their deployment process. This allowed them to easily test multiple email templates at once with one command.

• The use of Postman has significantly improved the operational efficiency of the Communications team at Youi. It has increased their confidence in the quality of the emails sent out from their engine, thereby enhancing the customer experience. From a process standpoint, the team was able to streamline their testing and enable developers to stay productive, efficient, and focused on development rather than on testing. The team plans to explore more Postman features in the future, such as converting Swagger docs into full Postman Collections. They will also continue to share tips and best practices with other Youi engineers and teams to grow Postman expertise organically across the organization.

• Over 100 APIs managed and tested

• 2,700+ test runs within one collection

• Significant time and effort saved for developers and QA analysts