100% of developers at TotalEnergies Digital Factory agree that Postman creates effortless collaboration

TDF not only provides products and services but also works in innovative ways to transform the energy landscape of tomorrow.

“TDF's APIs provide a bridge between different software solutions and systems, improving interoperability and enabling a legacy modernization process.”

Amin Aissous, Head of API Engineering, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

The first step to building a new product at TDF consists of creating dedicated delivery teams (squads), offering tailored expertise to meet specific requirements. Currently, more than 27 squads are working independently.

As an API team, the primary mission is to enhance the development and adoption of APIs within TDF.

Empowering delivery teams by providing the necessary tools, resources, and support to effectively create, manage, and consume APIs is TDF's top priority. This also includes promoting API best practices, ensuring consistency, and fostering collaboration among development teams to enhance overall API capabilities and usage.

Enhancing developer experience, providing clear direction, removing gaps, and allowing each stakeholder within TDF to work independently without collisions is an ongoing challenge. TDF is working on establishing an adaptive governance strategy throughout the API lifecycle. This ensures that every API offered by TDF delivers its intended value, with a focus on interoperability, consistency, legacy modernization, and security.

Collaboration is at the heart of the TDF API strategy, which aligns with the strengths of the Postman API Platform. By moving to the Postman Enterprise plan, TDF was able to create an internal API developer community while enhancing developer productivity and improving the developer experience.

“By offering APIs as products, we aim to onboard non-technical profiles into Postman, leveraging its enhancements in accessibility and usability for a more seamless and user-friendly experience.”

Youcef Zahariou, Software Engineer, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

Each product is linked to a workspace and a squad. Squad members work in synchronicity, gaining immediate feedback.

Team workspaces provide visibility, allowing developers to discover APIs and related products quickly. Transparency creates opportunities for collaboration through the sharing of API design practices. By forking Postman Collections, squads can reuse assets from other squads, saving developer labor and preventing duplication.

“The Postman API Platform is highly collaborative. Team workspaces enable our developer community to work effectively when designing and building APIs.”

Amin Aissous, Head of API Engineering, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

For the design and build stages of API lifecycle management, Postman has created a clear advantage. Now, developers can use different API assets, and flexible API workflows in Postman creating a robust internal API ecosystem. APIs can be connected to the source control system, a single source of truth that hosts API definitions.

During development, it is possible to see changes in real-time, whether the squad has opted for a design-first or code-first approach. The integrative API governance reports in the API editor alert developers to design issues early, allowing quicker fixes.

API governance is maintained through consistent adherence to compliance standards using Postman. Each API has a target value and requires individual governance guidelines. At TDF, Postman allowed the application of adaptive governance to manage the separate requirements of each product and its related APIs.

“Using Postman API Governance, API linting was streamlined, leading to higher-quality APIs, and enhanced compliance.”

Van-Manh VO, API Engineer, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

API linting automation enables greater consistency in API quality. The standardization of API design involved the integration of API definitions and the Postman CLI into the CI/CD tool. It's easier to check that APIs are compliant with internal guidelines. Automation has increased the efficiency of governance efforts, along with Postman Monitors which continuously check API health and performance.

There's a single source of truth for API documentation, and internally created collection and workspace templates. Developers can easily access clear recommendations that have led to an improvement in API quality.

“With a centralized Postman for the whole squad, it's much easier to share and test. We also use Postman Monitors to ensure that everything works as it should.”

João Américo, Tech Leader, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

API documentation provides critical information on authentication, consumption, and authorization. Accessing and understanding API documents is particularly important when creating dependencies between APIs. With documents being self-service, developer productivity has been enhanced.

In terms of API security, Postman provides a secure platform for the configuration of API-sensitive data. Credentials are saved, and in a Team Workspace only those who need it are provided access.

A qualitative survey of internal developers at TDF revealed that 100% of users agreed that with Postman, squad collaboration and development speed have been enhanced. The survey revealed that 62% of internal users have gained more time since using Postman. A further 31% of users have “Excellent” levels of satisfaction and say they have saved a tremendous amount of time thanks to Postman.

“The Postman API Platform is a flexible platform that provides a high range of valuable features with a really responsive Customer Success team on the Enterprise plan.”

Amin Aissous, Lead API / Solution Architect, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

API quality has increased significantly through adaptive governance, testing automation, centralized documentation and templates. Simultaneously, developer productivity has improved. The time to first call (TTFC) has been reduced from hours to minutes, accelerating onboarding time for developers. Postman has enabled the sharing of API knowledge and facilitated the creation of an internal developer community.

“The majority of developers are familiar with Postman. The platform easily connects with other solutions and integrates into our existing ecosystem.”

Van-Manh VO, API Engineer, TotalEnergies Digital Factory

In the near future, TDF is considering using the Postman Private API Network as a central API catalog, among other plans.