API collaboration

The development stage

Once an API has been designed, development teams can begin work on the implementation. API development relies heavily on effective source and version control methods like forking, merging, and conflict resolution, which enable team members to work in parallel while reducing the risk of breaking changes. Development teams can also use commenting features to give one another feedback alongside the relevant API artifacts and lines of code, which reduces context switching and accelerates their workflows.

The testing stage

API testing helps teams validate their API's behavior and confirm that it is able to meet its consumers' needs. API testing traditionally occurs once the development stage is complete, but it is becoming increasingly common for testing and engineering teams to work together to test APIs during development and in CI/CD pipelines. Testing early and often enables these teams to catch problems as soon as they are introduced, and it also helps them validate API design decisions before flaws become ingrained. This approach reduces the amount of overhead required to remediate issues, enabling teams to deploy high-quality APIs to production faster.

The distribution stage

Once an API has been designed, developed, tested, and deployed, teams must collaborate to ensure it can be discovered by consumers. This involves making the API available in either a private or public API catalog—and ensuring it has appropriate metadata that will allow it to be surfaced during search. Teams should also work together to create thorough, up-to-date documentation, which can help consumers understand the API's functionality and reduce their time to first call. Ultimately, the distribution stage helps ensure that internal APIs are not duplicated by other teams and that public APIs reach their intended audience and generate revenue.

Why are Postman workspaces a top API collaboration tool?

Postman workspaces are collaboration hubs that give teams shared access to the tools they need to solve problems together. By acting as a single source of truth for all API-related work, workspaces enable teams to build shared context while meeting organization-wide standards for API quality. Conversations in workspaces happen directly alongside the relevant API artifacts, which reduces context switching and streamlines the collaboration process. Workspaces also update in real time and record every change in version history, empowering teams to move quickly while ensuring that everyone stays on the same page.

Postman workspaces are incredibly versatile and can help teams:

Improve developer onboarding

When starting a new role, engineers must quickly familiarize themselves with their team's repositories, tools, and workflows—some of which may be unintuitive or poorly documented. To solve this problem, teams can create onboarding workspaces, which contain all of the relevant assets and information for getting new team members up to speed.

Accelerate the development process

Developer workspaces act as the go-to place for development teams to collaborate. They include documentation, tests, mock servers, and how-to guides, and they can be used in the pre-production, development, and post-production stages of the API lifecycle. By providing a single source of truth for all API artifacts, developer workspaces reduce bottlenecks and improve time-to-market.

Improve internal API discoverability

teams may choose to house all of their APIs in a single workspace, while larger companies may create a segmented workspace for each API and the team that is responsible for it. Mapping team structures to API workspaces creates a logical and scalable organizational framework that makes it easier for developers to find and view APIs that are managed by other internal teams.

Run tests and troubleshooting issues

Testing throughout the API lifecycle is a central pillar of the API-first strategy, as it enables teams to catch and remediate issues quickly. API-first teams can leverage dedicated API testing workspaces to create and run tests against APIs that are in development in other workspaces. These tests can also be integrated into any development team's CI processes with Postman's command-line tools.

Establish API design consistency

Leaders can create style guide workspaces, which contain reference APIs, design patterns, and “dos and don'ts,” to establish and enforce an effective API governance strategy across every team in their organization. Workspace style guides exist in the same platform where teams do their work, which allows developers to interact with them as “living documents”—and use them as jumping off points when developing and iterating on API elements.

Respond to support tickets

Support teams can use workspaces to maintain a log of steps they need to follow when responding to customer tickets, which enables them to fix problems quickly and keep ticket volumes under control. In fact, some developers share collections directly with support teams, which can dramatically reduce the time it takes to resolve an issue.

Connect with more developers

Solution engineers can use Postman workspaces to create demo environments for external APIs that showcase the API's primary use cases to potential customers. This enables them to close more deals and get new customers up and running quickly.

Public API workspaces also help API producers connect directly with their community. Public workspaces can contain documentation, how-to guides, and other reference material, which reduces the time-to-first call for new consumers. There are hundreds of thousands of public workspaces in Postman's Public API Network, offered by companies such as Salesforce, Stripe, Notion, and PayPal.

Collections

Postman Collections are groups of related requests, and they are the primary building blocks for all of Postman's features. For instance, collections allow teams to create mock servers, test suites, monitors, and documentation, which can be used by various teams throughout the API lifecycle. Collections also support commenting and version control, and can easily be shared with any stakeholder in an organization.

The API Builder

The Postman API Builder enables teams to collaboratively design and define an API in a wide range of formats—such as OpenAPI, GraphQL, and RAML—from within the API platform. It also allows them to bi-directionally sync their API schema with GitHub and GitLab, which helps establish a shareable source of truth for all API-related work. This enables development and testing teams to work in parallel against the same schema throughout the entire API lifecycle.

Integrations

The API lifecycle is complex and requires teams to leverage numerous tools for communication, infrastructure management, CI/CD, incident response, and performance monitoring. Postman provides built-in integrations with these tools, which reduces friction and streamlines collaboration workflows. For instance, Postman's Slack integration helps ensure that every stakeholder stays in the know about their team's API activity, as well as Postman Monitor results.

The Private API Network

Teams can use Postman's Private API Network to build a catalog of internal API artifacts, which facilitates API discoverability and helps developers avoid writing redundant code. In addition to helping teams connect and learn from one another, the Private API Network enables business leaders to establish and enforce effective API governance policies across their organization.

The Public API Network

The Postman Public API Network is the world's largest hub of public API artifacts, and it connects API producers with over 30 million developers around the world. The Public API Network allows producers to collaborate directly with their consumers, which shortens feedback loops and reduces ticket volume.