Manual Testing with Postman/Insomnia

While automated tests are the gold standard for reliability, manual testing is an essential part of the development workflow. API clients like Postman and Insomnia provide a graphical user interface that makes it incredibly easy to interact with APIs without writing any code. These tools are invaluable for several reasons. First, during development, they allow for rapid exploration and debugging. You can quickly build a request for a new endpoint you're working on, tweak the parameters, headers, and body, and immediately see the server's response, including the status code, headers, and body content. This instant feedback loop is much faster than writing a client script for every small change. Second, they are excellent for exploratory testing. You can easily test edge cases, send malformed data to see how the API handles errors, and check authentication and authorization flows. Third, these tools offer advanced features like creating collections of requests, which can be saved and shared with your team, effectively serving as executable API documentation. They also support environment variables, allowing you to easily switch between different environments (e.g., local development, staging, production) by changing variables like the base URL or API keys. Learning to use an API client effectively will significantly boost your productivity and help you build more robust APIs.