“APIs are the building blocks of modern software. However, those blocks have not always been accessible to everyone,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. “We are on a mission to change this. With more than 25 million users across every continent, we believe Postman can accomplish this at a massive scale so that any user, anywhere, can build and participate in today’s API-first world.”

According to the company, Postman Flows is a response to the increasing demand for low-code tools that allow users to build software without a large amount of programming experience. 

With this release, users can manipulate data with API calls as well as create workflows utilizing a high volume of readily available APIs. The company stated that this makes it so that everyone can come up with solutions to common problems. 

Postman Flows was inspired by the idea of “blocks” to form and visualize an application, allowing users to drag the blogs, build the application, and deploy the workflow. Additionally, with the use of AI, users can manipulate data returned by APIs by typing out what they want to do in natural language.

“Postman Flows is the sweet spot for us, as it gives our non-technical team members a low-code tool to build, document, test, and implement an API workflow,” said Thomas Schlegel, engineer at Built Technologies. “We can accomplish tasks faster with fewer errors, and we look forward to maximizing these benefits across the organization.”

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The Postman API Platform works to simplify each step of the API-first lifecycle as well as promotes collaboration so that company’s can create better APIs with increased speed.

Microsoft Azure API Management is a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform that helps to abstract back-end services and create modern API gateways available in over 50 regions around the world. 

“This announcement is great news for organizations that recognize APIs as fundamental business assets critical to digital transformation,” said Abhijit Kane, co-founder of Postman. “By uniting the world’s top API platform and a leading cloud provider, our two companies have taken a significant step in giving customers the comprehensive set of tools they need for accelerating the API lifecycle.”

With this partnership, users can create and test their APIs in Postman, deploy them to Azure, and simplify customers’ API onboarding experience.

Additionally, customers gain Postman-initiated imports from Azure API Management, the ability to export OpenAPI definitions to Azure API Management, and Azure API Management-initiated export of APIs into Postman. 

“Our goal is to enable developers with the most efficient way to build, manage, consume and collaborate with APIs, so a partnership with Postman was a natural decision for us,” said Balan Subramanian at Microsoft. “Our integrations will enable customers to realize productivity benefits at each phase of the API lifecycle. Together, we look forward to seeing how developers and customers everywhere will continue to drive innovation across their organizations by embracing an API-first culture.”

To learn more, read the blog. 

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The new and improved features include deeper integration with version control systems, all-new private API networks which provides a central directory of all internal APIs in an organization, and simplified API documentation and onboarding. 

The new version of the platform also includes a new enterprise governance feature in which team members with the Community Manager role can now view all public collection links created by all team members in one place, with the ability to see who created which link and remove any links to collections that are not for public viewing.

Developers can now bring together key components with the definition of APIs including source code management, CI/CD, API gateways, and APM to help you govern the entire API landscape.

“Over the last few years we’ve seen the API-first mindset become embraced by a wide range of customers, from individual developers and early-stage teams to Fortune 500 companies,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. “Meanwhile, the entire API Management category has been stuck in a code-first world—focusing only on gateways and lacking the tooling necessary to harness the true power of APIs. We believe that the transition from code-first to API-first is a significant technology shift, and that to succeed in the API-first world, engineering organizations need a set of API tools integrated into a new category of solutions: API Platforms.”

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Nim 1.4 was the latest release of the language in October, which brought a new major version of the beta-grade package manager Nimble, v0.12.0. It also featured ORC management, Nim’s all-new cycle collector based on ARC, which has all of the advantages or ARC except for determinism, according to the Nim developers in a blog post.

Nim also hit a major milestone by crossing 1500 available Nim packages, and the number of submitted packages this year saw a 35% growth over previous years. 

Postman API Hack announced
Postman’s new hackathon is beginning on Monday, Jan. 25th and offering $100,000 in cash prizes. The winner will be announced at Postman Galaxy which takes places between February 2nd to 4th. 

“Our goal with the Postman API Hack is to highlight the amazing things that become possible by harnessing the power of APIs, and to showcase developers’ work to our community of more than 13 million users and 500,000 organizations. We’re excited to see what participants will come up with, and how they will have an impact on the world,” said Abhinav Asthana, the co-founder and CEO of Postman.

Additional details on the hackathon are available here.

TIBCO acquires Information Builders (ibi) 
The acquisition will add ibi’s data management and analytics capabilities to the advanced TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform.

Ibi has data quality, preparation, and integration products that are now being added to the TIBCO Any Data Hub and TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh. 

“This represents a significant opportunity for TIBCO and ibi as customers strive to become data-first enterprises. There is tremendous potential for any platform that can integrate and manage data to create intelligent workflows for employees, partners, and customers,” said Howard Dresner, the chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services.

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“While there have been many reports of security breaches over the past year, not just with APIs, but technology as a whole, what doesn’t make the news is that there are millions of APIs that operate as expected, with no security breaches, day after day, month after month, year after year,” Rebecca Johnston-Gilbert, a Postman spokesperson stated in an email to SD Times. “Our survey reflects the confidence in the security of their APIs, of both developers and the industry as a whole. The reality is that jobs are on the line, and reducing vulnerabilities and keeping APIs secure are important goals they work toward every day.”

RELATED CONTENT: The next wave of API management

The annual Postman State of the API report is designed to provide insights into the most significant issues and opportunities for APIs to address in 2020. Postman surveyed over 10,000 API developers, users, testers, and executives for the report. The survey revealed that more developers work with APIs than other users in an organization, but that the reach of APIs is expanding to more than just developers. About 46% of respondents identified as being a front-end or back-end developer. Some of the other roles represented in the survey include QA engineers, technical team leads, API architects, and DevOps specialists. 

“This year’s survey data reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding beyond developers,” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s co-founder and CEO. “Working directly with APIs has become part of a surprising number of positions, including non-developers such as executives and technical writers, which we think is an intriguing trend.”

The report also found that almost half of the respondents do not feel their APIs break, stop working, or change specification often enough to matter. About 28% said that breakages and changes occurred monthly, 15.7% said weekly, and 3.2% said daily. 

Another key finding is that 63.5% of respondents feel that providing examples in documentation is the most helpful enhancement that API providers can make. This was followed by standardization (59.4%) and sample code (57.8%). Other helpful enhancements included real-world use case, better workflows, additional tools, and SDKs. 

Postman also found that a majority of developers working with APIs haven’t been working with them for long. Around 78% of developers have less than five years of developing APIs, and only 12.2% have 10 or more years of experience working with APIs. API work also seems to be handled by small teams, with 72.6% of developers working with APIs being on teams with 10 members or less. In addition, 25.7% were on teams with 22 to 50 members and 1.7% were on teams with over 50 members. 

The company also discovered the breakdown of time spent working with APIs. According to the 2019 Postman State of the API report:

• 26.1% of time is spent on development, 
• 22.2% of time is spent on debugging and manual testing, 
• 11.4% of time is spent on automated testing, 
• 11.2% of time is spent on designing and mocking, 
• 9.1% is spent on managing others, 
• 7.3% is spent on documentation, 
• 5.7% is spent on monitoring, 
• 3.6 is spent on publishing, 
• and 3.3% of time is spent on writing about APIs. 

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GraphQL offers more precise querying, which is useful when working with large APIs that return a lot of data, according to Postman.

Postman v7.2 supports sending GraphQL queries in the request body, GraphQL variables and GraphQL query autocompletion. Additionally, GraphQL support paired the recent release of schema support and building APIs directly in Postman means users can now create and store GraphQL schemas directly in Postman itself, the team explained

“GraphQL is a crucial spec that has been growing in popularity and we’re excited to support developers whose workflow involves testing GraphQL APIs,” Postman wrote in a post.

Compuware expands CI/CD with machine learning and Git integration
Compuware expanded its CI/CD solution with the addition of advanced analytics software zAdviser as well as Git integration and customized expert services.

With the combination of zAdviser and ISPW, the company’s CI/CD solution, customers can utilize machine learning to improve mainframe software development and delivery, Compuware explained. Meanwhile, its new customized end-to-end service, ISPW Sentry Services, will offer expert assistance with maintenance and upgrades.

“The modernization of mainframe software delivery to a state of high-performance is absolutely achievable, said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “Companies can transform their most critical back-end platform by enabling a preferred developer experience, automating manual-process constraints, integrating with best-in-class tools and inspiring a culture of continuous improvement inspired and guided by software delivery KPIs of velocity, quality and efficiency.”

ActiveState automates builds of custom Python and Perl runtimes for Windows
ActiveState is enhancing its SaaS offering to automate builds of custom Python and Perl runtimes for Windows.

The ActiveState Platform allows users to automatically build minimal runtimes specific to their project. The result is a runtime environment with a smaller footprint that uses less resources, and offers a decreased attack surface, according to the company.

Additionally, the State Tool can be used to automatically download and install custom runtime into a virtual environment on any workstation with a single command.

“The ActiveState Platform allows developers to automate the building of runtimes from our catalog of Python and Perl packages to suit the unique needs of their projects,” said Jeff Rouse, the vice president of product management at ActiveState.

Software AG’s lightweight integration and development tool
Software AG unveiled webMethods Service Designer, a lightweight integrated design and development tool for building integrations and APIs.

This provides users a one year free trial to develop Flow services, APIs and integrations using Eclipse and to generate unit test cases for DevOps automation, according to Software AG.

“To compete, you need to harness your digital DNA by connecting business apps, devices, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and hybrid cloud and quickly be ready for what’s next. The webMethods Service Designer offers a lightweight possibility to do just that – be ready virtually overnight for whatever comes next,” said Stefan Sigg, chief product officer at Software AG.

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According to the company, this is a major update that gives team leaders the ability to assign permissions at every level.

“Assigning roles and permissions to team members helps keep your team’s workflow organized and ensures that each teammate has a clear role in contributing to the development of your APIs. We know not everyone plays the same role in a team and that’s why Postman offers several roles and permissions to enable flexible team structure,” the team wrote in a post.

Some examples of the roles now available include:

• Workspace admin: who can edit workspace information such as name, summary and settings
• Workspace collaborator: who can view all resources in the workspace as well as add and remove stuff
• Team Developer: who has access to team resources

In order to take advantage of this new feature, users will have to migrate to the latest version of Postman. More information on how to do that is available here.

“Along with performance enhancements, and a better in-app learning experience, the latest release of Postman delivers the granular access management our users need to maximize operational efficiency and protect sensitive API code,” Abhinav Asthana, CEO and founder of Postman.

Additionally, the company announced its API development platform is expected to come to beta this spring.

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In addition, GigaFox provides a convenient solution in the form of one single platform where mobile development and testing teams can access all mobile devices. GigaFox provides one stable platform where enterprise mobility teams can direct and build CI/CD pipelines to produce apps and to install them on devices for all testing needs.

RELATED CONTENT:
Adding value to your CI/CD pipeline
A guide to DevOps CI/CD tools

Jeffrey Keyes, director of product marketing for the software company Plutora:
At a high level, we address three areas. The first is that we integrate with and unify the entirety of the Agile and DevOps toolchain, including CI/CD tooling. The point of unification is eliminating the inefficiencies and loss of fidelity of handoffs. We also correlate the data and artifacts into the stages of delivery and relate all of the information together.  This is critical as you need to see what features are actually being delivered, how that relates to code being built, where it sits in the pipeline and the relationship of test to all of that data.

The second area is the management of key processes. We provide release orchestration enabling additional visibility and logic enhancements augmenting the CI/CD pipeline.  We can orchestrate between the manual and automated tasks of any pipeline, decomposing delivery into phases and gates ensuring governance is maintained and you have appropriate levels of quality. We have a deployment planning and orchestration which augments application release automation managing the go-live activities.  We also have a non-production environment management solution centralizing the requests, orchestrating the provisioning and manages the utilization of pre-production environments.

The third area is the analytics and the visualization of the value stream itself. We provide out-of-box visualizations, including a value stream map, for the flow of work along the entire process. We provide rich “what-if” scenario analysis and comparison metrics including using teams and time as dimensions.  We enable you to answer the most important question of digital transformation – are we improving?

Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of API development solution provider Postman:
Postman offers a comprehensive API testing tool that makes it easy to set up automated tests. You can aggregate the tests and requests you’ve created into a single automated test sequence that you can reuse again and again.

Integration testing is hard. Running through sad paths consisting of hundreds of failing dependencies is a nearly impossible task for all but the largest organizations. From simple happy path debugging to thorough sad path deployment, Postman keeps your tests tightly coupled with your services. The tool is approachable, allowing even less technical QA team members to contribute to a testing suite. At the same time, it is robust in allowing the simulation of complex workflows and business logic.

Every test that can be run manually via the Postman GUI, can be automated in Postman’s command line tool, Newman, and can be included as a build step in your pipeline. With Postman you aren’t testing just your code, but the fabric of your entire service, and those it relies on. Hundreds of organizations have built Postman collections alongside their development and employed them as integration tests. Your developers are already debugging with Postman, why not put that work to good use?

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“Working software is the only measure of progress, but how to you measure that? You need to integrate and test the software as often as possible and fix errors when and as soon as possible,” said William Holz, senior director analyst at the research firm Gartner.

According to Holz, in order to move faster and be successful in the areas of Agile and DevOps, you need to add Agile technical practices to your software development, such as test-driven development and refactoring. One of the best technical practices out there is to create a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. According to Gartner, CI and CD are the most widespread Agile practices organizations are currently using or plan to use.

RELATED CONTENT:
How do you add value to the CI/CD pipeline?
A guide to DevOps CI/CD tools
The ultimate guide to a successful continuous delivery pipelines

Continuous integration is the “automation of the software build and validation process driven in a continuous way by running a configured sequence of operations every time a software change is checked into the source code management repository,” according to Gartner. Dan Packer, industry specialist for the software company Plutora, explained the benefits here are testing, issue resolution, phased changeover, improved team morale, increased velocity, improved quality and improved budget. “With CI, the handoff from one stage to the next is fully automated up to the completion of the testing stage. This is starkly different than that of the waterfall methodology, where the handoff between stages is typically fully manual throughout the entire lifecycle and deals primarily with completed applications vs. small code segments,” Packer wrote in a blog post.  

CD is an evolutionary step of CI designed to take automation further, according to Packer. Continuous delivery is the act of releasing reliable software faster through technical delivery and deployment practices like working in small batches and automating repetitive tasks. Benefits include improved velocity, phased progression, always production ready and release control, Packer wrote.

Together, they make up the CI/CD pipeline: A continuous flow of software designed to reduce manual and error-prone work, and result in higher quality software. “This is important because the ninth principle of Agile states attention to technical excellence and design increases your agility. In Agile, rework is waste. The time you spend fixing bugs is time that can be better spent delivering new features and functionality,” said Gartner’s Holz. “You need to be able to do CI and DevOps to achieve continuous delivery. It is no longer about your software. It is about delivering the entire solution.”

According to Holz, this is how you accelerate your Agile and DevOps initiatives successfully, reduce risks and catch bugs. CI/CD enables the ability to build, package, integrate, test and release code with automation.

“Complex operations like CI/CD cannot be accomplished without significant engineering effort. DevOps recognizes the importance of joining tooling and thought throughout the entire process of development and deployment rather than isolating build and production. Rather than having distinct steps when creating a service, DevOps encourages simultaneous development and testing. CI/CD pipelines fit into this perfectly by providing a way to automate the testing portion,” explained Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of the API development solution provider Postman.

Bringing value stream management into the mix
Once you are delivering working software faster, the next thing to ask yourself is are your processes becoming more efficient? Are you not only working faster, but delivering value?

According to Aaron McCaughan, product owner at the software company Plutora, this is where value stream mapping comes in. Gartner’s William Holz explained a value stream is a collection or series of steps that deliver customer value. For instance, if you buy something on Amazon, the order button is a value stream. You click the button and it goes through a series of steps to get your package to your door. Value stream mapping provides insights into those steps, where the value is, where the value isn’t, and detects areas that can be improved.

“With CI/CD, you might be able to react, you might be able to deliver faster, but you also have to factor in am I delivering value faster?,” McCaughan said. “What am I putting into the pipeline that is satisfying my customer so that I am actually keeping everyone happy and increasing the value of the product?”  

Many of the metrics teams are looking at are deployment frequencies, number of check-ins per day, build failure rates, or mean time to recovery. While those are interesting indicators of work, they don’t really measure customer value or help you understand what is flowing through the system, according to Jeffrey Keyes, director of product marketing for Plutora. “The reason people are jumping on the value stream management bandwagon is to answer the question of are we doing better than we did before? Have we improved?” he said. “Value stream mapping and management takes a holistic view of application delivery. You are not trying to fix one point. You are trying to deal with process improvement as a system of pieces and make the most effective switch.”

Value stream management provides a broader view of the entire delivery life cycle long before the software becomes software, McCaughan explained. It goes from ideation to production so you can start tracking your value stream map as soon as you identified your strategic goals for the organization and start identifying bottlenecks. “For instance, if there are three months of planning on average for each change coming through, you can start addressing that,” said McCaughan. “If you are trying to do too much, you are maybe not delivering as fast as you could, whereas if you are focusing on a smaller number of changes or features across your organization, you are more than likely going to be able to deliver them faster. It’s about capturing those dependencies, wait times and overburdens.”

Specific metrics the value stream map brings to light are the average cycle times it takes to deliver a feature, process time, waste time, and actual time spent working on the feature, according to Keyes.

“If you are spending half your time putting out fires, you are not adding value. You are just reacting to production defects or technical debt,” said McCaughan. “You need to identify how much time your delivery teams are spending on just keeping the lights on and fixing defects versus growing your product and expanding and improving the customer experience.”

“Value stream management is the combination of Agile plus DevOps plus the measured outcomes at each phase,” Keyes added. 

Bringing the CI/CD pipeline to your mobile initiatives
With mobile becoming more advanced, the services it offers have to be up to par with users’ increasing demands for it to not only work, but work correctly and work fast. The CI/CD pipeline is an important aspect to any successful mobile initiative because it gives teams immediate insight into any changes happening or problems in an application, enables faster turnaround time and deployment, and provides in-depth reports and status on what is going on within the pipeline, according to Steve Orlando, senior director of product marketing for Mobile Labs.

“QA and dev teams need to know what they are testing, and continuous integration makes it possible to always have the latest app build installed by the build system,” added Michael Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs. “Continuous integration enables continuous testing. Mobility and real devices introduce additional manual steps, such as Google and Apple tools, to install apps on devices for testing. This is both time consuming and is prone to error. Continuous integration saves the manual labor and eliminates errors.”

To successfully implement a CI/CD pipeline into a mobile development strategy, Orlando explained continuous testing becomes an integral part of the pipeline. “Continuous testing requires automated tests,” he said. “These tests can be run on their own, freeing up testers to focus on making sure the app meets business objectives and has a good user experience.”

By including testing in each stage of the pipeline, mobile developers will be able to find and respond to bugs faster and gain in-depth and real-time knowledge on the source of a problem. Each stage of the pipeline includes testing source code to see if it causes conflicts when it is merged, running unit tests as part of the build process, and enabling full automated regression tests, according to Orlando. He also added that  testing and the pipeline should be paired with a mobile device cloud so teams can run continuous tests on real devices or simulators.

“Testing the right app version on the right mobile OS and the right device type complicates the matter compared to web testing.  CI allows automated installation of the right app on the right device and OS improving engineer efficiency and eliminating errors in the process,” said Ryan.

Why a good API strategy matters
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are increasingly becoming more important to software development as organizations embrace connected services and microservices architectures. “Meaning that APIs are consumed by many different people and are integrated with diverse and complex services,”said Postman CEO and co-founder Abinhav Asthana.

According to Gartner’s William Holz, in order to do effective CI/CD, APIs are important because they create a separation of concerns and enable the ability to test at the unit level, feature level, integration level and performance level. “APIs gives me an idea of where to look for a problem, help me solve that problem sooner, and minimize the amount of waste or rework I need to do,” he said. “I use the example that I can have 100 percent unit test coverage, but I can still break features. I can still break my application because unit tests don’t test the future.”

However, according to Asthana, testing is difficult, and in order for an API strategy to be a powerful tool, dependencies need to be removed. “With connected services, dependencies are a huge concern. If a team updates an API, it could potentially break an API consumer’s service, but a CI/CD pipeline can solve this problem,” Asthana said. “CI/CD pipelines ensure that connected services are healthy by consistently checking for broken dependencies with full system tests at every build. This means that broken dependencies are most often caught in development rather than in production. The later a bug is caught, the more expensive and time-consuming it becomes to fix it.”

Once a CI/CD pipeline is set up, developers can run integration tests as part of their build. According to Asthana, those tests stay with the developer until they pass, which means the production environment remains safe from harm. “A good CI/CD pipeline will have reporting built in, so testers can review their automatically run test results and determine the source of not just errors in their code, but errors in interaction with dependencies,” Asthana said.

Asthana adds that teams should also find a tool or framework that can write tests and maintain a test library for the pipeline. This will ensure a good set of tests that can be used and reused. Tools should also provide the ability to test against live environments, services and data, and have a system of reporting implemented so developers and tests can get access to insights quickly, according to Asthana.

“Implementation of CI/CD greatly simplifies API management. The consistency and reliability of a CI/CD pipeline mean that developers aren’t bothered with manually managing dependencies between versions. Instead of putting out fires, developers can spend their time improving products. CI/CD pipelines catch errors early on, which saves time and money,” he said.

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Starting with Postman 6.2, all free Postman users will be able to create Postman teams, use team workspaces, and use collaboration features, all of which were previously available only to customers of Postman’s paid plans. These features will now be scaled for individuals and small projects.

“Teams are the foundation of API development,” said Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman. “Now, every developer can invite their entire team to Postman, improving collaboration and making their API workflow more effective.”

In addition, this release adds a new feature named Sessions, which adds session-specific collection, environment, and global variables, the company explained. Session variables will not be synced to the cloud, so developers can be assured that when they are working with sensitive information, it will stay local to their Postman instance. This in turn provides flexibility to developers working with APIs in Postman and reduces security concerns.

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