How collaboration works in Postman

Learn how developers, testers, architects, and other stakeholders work together to build and consume APIs.

Postmanauts celebrating in space. Illustration.

What does collaboration mean in API development?

The need for collaboration has grown and changed as APIs have become more integrated with services—and even become products themselves. Now, API consumers aren't just developers. They are customer support, go-to-market, and developer relations teams who need to stay up-to-date on the latest changes.

API-first development

An API-first approach starts with API design and development before writing a single line of code. This allows you to:

Save time and effort by gathering feedback and make changes early.
Ensure compatibility with all devices, platforms, and operating systems.

Code and API repositories

Just like code, APIs need a single, dedicated space that:

Allows both producers and consumers to find, build, and learn about APIs.
Integrates with source code repositories to keep the API and software development lifecycles in sync.

Producer and Consumer diagram with feedback cycle. Illustration.

Producers and consumers

API development requires close collaboration between consumers and producers.

Consumers need stay up-to-date on the latest changes to how the API works.
Producers need feedback from consumers to ensure they're building the right thing.

Postman makes it easy to create this feedback cycle by providing a single platform where producers and consumers can work and communicate together.

Integrations

Building APIs is complex and requires a number of different tools. Postman helps the tools you use work better together through:

Built-in integrations and the Postman API.
Easy integrations with third-party tools like GitHub, Datadog, and many more.

Learn more about integrations →

What is a workspace?

A workspace is a shared context for building and consuming APIs. Postman workspaces allow real-time collaboration within and between teams with built-in version control.

Learn more about workspaces →

Create a shared context

Workspaces provide a shared context for your APIs, helping your team get up to speed and stay up to date. With workspaces, you can:

Mirror your team's workflow with workspaces dedicated to a particular project or to specific functions like technical writing or testing.
Easy integrations with third-party tools like GitHub, Datadog, and many more.

Work in parallel with version control

Workspaces support core version control concepts like forking, merging, and conflict resolution, allowing teams to:

Easily resolve conflicts.
Collaborate on multiple forks simultaneously.
Seamlessly merge changes.

Invite users and share work

Invite as many users as you want to collaborate in workspaces.

Maintain granular access control with roles and permissions.
Collaborate on collections in real time to keep teams on the same page.

Create a feedback loop

Use comments to give and receive feedback on requests, APIs, and collections, creating faster feedback cycles that reduce development time.

What is a collection?

Collections are executable API descriptions. They are groups of related requests and are the primary building block for all of Postman's features, allowing you to build mock servers, generate documentation, create monitors and build test suites.

Collections: executable API descriptions

While static API descriptions in the OpenAPI, RAML, or GraphQL formats describe how your API is supposed to behave, collections show how it actually behaves.

To keep your collections and schemas in sync, write and edit the schema directly in Postman or import a schema and convert it into a collection.

Postman Runtime

The open source Postman Runtime executes all API requests, ensuring consistent request execution across Postman's products, including:

The Postman App
Newman, our open-source command line tool
Postman's monitoring service

Postman Collection SDK

The Postman Collection SDK is an open-source project that defines the collection format. It provides:

Helpful tools for generating and parsing collections,
Visibility into the collection format, defined by a JSON-based schema

What is an API in Postman?

An API in Postman defines metadata like name, descriptions, and versions, along with elements like schema, documentation, environments, and test suites.

Organize your API workflow

Manage your workflow in four stages.

Define APIs in formats like OpenAPI, GraphQL, and RAML.
Develop your API by adding mock servers, documentation, and environments to specific API versions.
Test your API by writing integration and contract tests.
Observe your API by monitoring it for performance and response time.

Track development with version tags

Easily maintain multiple versions of an API and its elements at the same time.

Define multiple versions of an API.
Keep track of your development process.
Organize your work with your preferred naming convention.

Increase flexibility with schemas

Write, edit, and import schemas in Postman.

Create APIs with schema formats including OpenAPI, GraphQL, and RAML.
Easily generate collections from your API schema.
Develop in parallel by sharing schemas with development and testing teams early on.

Connect it all on one platform

Organize and manage every aspect of your API development workflow in one place.

Maintain a sharable source of truth between your team and with other teams.
Maintain multiple versions of your API and API elements in one place.
Automatic syncing ensures all linked elements are up-to-date and in sync.

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