from Hacker News

How do sales/marketing/ops teams test APIs without using engineering resources?

by dirtbag__dad on 3/9/21, 11:19 AM with 4 comments

Say I’m a first sales hire and I want to run outbound email tests using different APIs to enrich or filter my data. There are a handful of data sources I can choose from. I don’t know what’s quality vs junk, and I don’t know what data will show results.

I’m excited to try it all, but my engineering team has very limited bandwidth and I’m not technical. Is there a tool that I can use to call the APIs I’ve found?

It would be infinitely better to be self sufficient than to hammer engineering while I’m exploring what works and what doesn’t.

Tools like Zapier _might_ be helpful here, but something that I can easily do batch API requests would be the dream.

Any suggestions?

  • by 2rsf on 3/10/21, 8:48 AM

    I haven't actually tried that but you can build BDD style tests for APIs using Karate [1]. Your feature file could be technical, but you can wrap that in some accessible keywords for non-techies

    [1] https://github.com/intuit/karate

  • by Rocketship on 3/15/21, 12:56 AM

    sayprimer.com actually can do this and deliver you CSV files for outbound. I just finished building the automated outbound process for MainStreet and it required no engineer and it will be automated. Happy to chat more about how I did this if you want.

  • by thedevindevops on 3/9/21, 2:05 PM

    I'm not entirely positive its what you would want but maybe take a look at Postman

  • by codegladiator on 3/9/21, 5:38 PM

    not sure where you saw this, but usually they don't. worst case scenario is UAT.