Hathway cuts production time in half writing custom tests when using Postman

Hathway provides essential technological infrastructure for thousands of restaurants, powering 160 million digital transactions worth $2 billion each year. That's a lot of money on the line: for context, in large-scale quick-serve operations, a single hour's worth of lost sales could result in the loss of a quarter of a million dollars. In addition, when rewards cannot be processed or redeemed, this creates frustration for both customers and employees, setting the scene for a negative customer experience.

The Hathway QA team reduces the risk of impact to customer experience and client revenue by creating a custom test suite for each new client. Although it is based on a standard template, creating that suite adds a substantial workload to the onboarding process.

The team recognised that they need a more streamlined, scalable process as more clients invest in digital growth services. Already familiar with the Postman API Platform, the Hathway team turned to Postman as their API testing platform of choice.

Postman Collections reduce time to onboard new clients

Postman enabled the Hathway QA team to accelerate their new client onboarding in two ways. First, by storing the base test suite as part of a Postman Collection.

The second benefit comes from the simplification of writing tests with Postman. Most clients require specific integrations with preferred providers for functionality such as authentication or payments. The Hathway engineering team makes these customizations and the QA team amends the test suite accordingly. With the Postman API Platform, writing those custom tests takes significantly less time than it would take to use a manual scripting solution.

“Postman is the ideal partner. It is by developers for developers, so there's a mutual respect. We love the reliability and the constant improvement brought about by new features.”

Rochelle Turner, QA Manager, Hathway

Postman Environments improves the test suite's maintainability

Similarly, Hathway has used the Postman environment variables to reduce the ongoing burden of catering to variations in how each client implements the Hathway platform. Rather than maintain multiple versions of the test suite, the QA team can use a Postman Environment for each client. The common test suite can then check the content of those environment variables and change its behavior accordingly. Postman Environments are also a way to secure API values, such as tokens or secrets, that may be specific to clients.

Immediate discovery of issues with Postman Monitors

Using Postman's API Monitors and the Slack integration, the Hathway QA team receives timely Slack notification of any issues with the platform's internal APIs or its integrations with partner APIs.

Monitor alerts also prove useful in cross-team collaboration between QA and Engineering. By pinpointing the time at which an issue first occurred, Postman Monitors reduce the work of investigating issues. More broadly, the Postman Collections improves the efficiency of conversations between the QA and Engineering teams as it gives them a common view and understanding. It also allows Hathway to keep a live pulse on issues that manage to breach API tests and partner outages.

“Postman's API Monitors enable us to pinpoint the precise moment that a problem is introduced into test environments. As a result, our engineers can develop and deploy fixes faster and with less risk.”/span>

Alis Blomberg, Senior QA Engineer, Hathway

The Hathway team is only beginning its journey with Postman, but their test engineers have already seen profound improvements in efficiency and time savings.

By using Postman Collections, the QA team's process is better able to meet increased demand for the Hathway platform from new clients. In some cases, custom test development is up to twice as fast and ongoing maintenance is greatly simplified.

Having recently merged with digital innovation agency, Bounteous, the Hathway team looks forward to a bright future where Postman enables them to serve more clients.