Youi automates 2,700+ test runs per deployment on Postman

Youi's Communications (or “Comms” as they're known internally) team is responsible for the APIs that run Youi's email templating engine. Previously, the Comms team would test endpoints manually or write integration and unit tests in .NET to execute endpoints—a QA process that they found slow and cumbersome. In addition, they had a legacy system in place for generating documents that was not tied to automated testing. Whenever the documents changed over time, or new ones were added, there was a risk of introducing regression issues.

As in many organizations, process change happened at Youi organically. In 2016, a few developers and QA analysts began using Postman and recommended it to others. As more and more people started using it, Postman eventually became the dominant API testing tool for two-thirds of the organization.

“Postman usage grew organically as developers started realizing the benefits they get out of using the tool and how much easier it makes a lot of things, especially API testing.”

Evan Newland-Nell, Development Manager, Youi Insurance

For the Comms team, Postman offered a fast, effective way to test and validate their email templating APIs. They maintain their own Postman workspace for internal collaboration, which gives everyone easy access to Postman Collections that contain API endpoints and testing workflows.

In the beginning, Youi developers would simply formulate a request on Postman, send it, and visually check the responses. As the platform became a more integral tool, the team began formalizing their Postman workflows. Now, when working on updates, developers will 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 Comms team automates testing by integrating Newman, Postman's command-line collection runner, into their CI pipeline as part of their deployment process. By organizing each collection's folder structure based on a testing sequence, they can easily test multiple email templates at once with one command.

“We were able to get our testing processes up and running quickly on Postman, which was a huge benefit to us.”

Ashley Kurkowski, .NET Developer, Youi Insurance

Currently, the Comms team's collection for their email template API contains over 2,700 test runs—all fully automated. Whenever developers make changes to their API, the tests run automatically during deployment, saving the developers and QA analysts significant time and effort.

“One of my favorite things about Postman is the structured way we can run tests. We don't have to duplicate tests for every request; we can just write them once and automate the rest.”

Ashley Kurkowski, .NET Developer, Youi Insurance

For the Comms team, using Postman has increased their confidence in the quality of the emails sent out from their engine, which, in turn, delivers an optimal 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.

Going forward, the Comms team is planning to explore more Postman features, such as converting Swagger docs into full Postman Collections. They will also continue to swap tips and best practices with other Youi engineers and teams in order to constantly grow Postman expertise organically across the organization.

“The deeper you go with Postman, the more features you find. And it's easy to try out new features as we need them.”

Ashley Kurkowski, .NET Developer, Youi Insurance