Flix drives productivity for testing by saving 10 hours per month with Postman Collections

One of the persistent challenges for collaboration was API design. During this phase, extensive communication regarding data structures and formats was necessary. Developers shared static JSON files in email or via a wiki. The static files created uncertainty over whether the shared specification was the latest version. When the design was agreed upon, the users had to wait for implementation to be completed. This was time-consuming.

APIs play a critical role with worldwide external partners using Flix APIs to sell tickets. Previously, API integration was delayed for partners as onboarding was an involved process. Partners use the Flix public APIs to sell tickets on their channels. To do this, partner developers had to read Flix API documentation to implement their client from scratch. It proved to be a cumbersome and error-prone method. It resulted in a lengthy integration process that involved resolving issues by sharing cURL commands.

API testing was inefficient, predominantly manual and didn't involve users. The potential risk was inadvertently introducing breaking changes that would affect the business.

The Postman Enterprise plan provides multiple features and has made it easier to build APIs, automated testing, and enhanced API collaboration, among other things.

“Postman is a Swiss Army knife for APIs. It has features for every stage. There's built-in governance, security linting, and easy-to-run mock servers and monitors.”

André Gräf, API Guardian, Flix

Postman allows Flix to collaborate directly with users in the OpenAPI definition during the API design phase. There is no need to exchange static files or communicate through other channels. OpenAPI definitions have accelerated API development. Standards can now be shared easily with API users while enabling automated code generation in many languages and different types of validation. Generating collections from a definition in Postman's API Builder is as simple as clicking a button. These collections can be used for mocking, monitoring, and testing.

Partners can download example Postman Collections from the Flix developer portal. The time to first call (TTFC) was reduced from hours to minutes. Now, issues are less likely during the integration phase. If there are any issues, they can be resolved quickly by exchanging collections that reflect specific partner requirements. Collections provide a common language between Flix and partners and are the single source of truth. Collaboration has been improved exponentially and in real-time.

“Mock servers removed development dependencies. Postman allows API development, testing and releases to be run in parallel. There's no waiting for API implementation to be completed.”

Eduardo Iriarte-Mendez, Senior Software Engineer, Flix

Postman has been integrated into any CI pipeline to facilitate test automation. By adding Postman to the central API publishing pipeline, consumer contract testing has been automated for all APIs. Users can create contract collections with API documentation, and assign them to the respective API using Postman.

Postman's performance test feature makes testing simpler. It just requires a collection runner to be opened and then for the virtual user numbers along with the test duration to be defined. The dynamic test data modification allows the execution of performance tests to simulate real user behavior. In a rapidly growing company such as Flix, there are many competing priorities, but increasingly performance is particularly important as it ensures quality. For this reason, Postman's performance test feature is highly beneficial for Flix.

For the individual developer, Postman is a better way of working when consuming and interacting with APIs. Team-level collaboration using assets created on an individual level is seamless. At an organizational level, productivity increased due to improving the developer experience while also reducing onboarding times and the TTFC.

Postman's API security feature enables developers to follow Flix security guidelines from the design phase onwards. The built-in security rules on Postman cover the OWASP top list of API security risks. There's no need to develop a security linting solution, the only requirement is for Flix to add its own custom linting rules.

Flix can integrate Postman with its internal application portfolio using the SCIM API. Adding new users through the user management of the Flix access management solution is easy and straightforward.

“Building and testing is now seamless with Postman. It's where all the API magic happens.”

Julián Alarcon, API Guardian, Flix

Specific API request flows are now monitored. For instance, the booking flow is monitored. This ensures partners can perform all requests, from authentication and search to creating a booking through payment.

Postman has created magic for Flix through automation and acceleration of various processes. One of the most significant benefits has been using collections alongside the developer portal, it has significantly reduced external partner support requests.

The combination of collections with the developer portal has accelerated onboarding times for external partners. Consequently, there's been a reduction of the TTFC to less than five minutes from its previous two-hour benchmark.

Automating API testing with collections saves up to ten hours per month. Ten hours are also being saved with mock servers as users can directly integrate clients with mock servers during the API design phase.