Day 5
Are there any tools that get a bad reputation when perhaps they shouldn’t?
Confluence and Jira.
They’re often painful to use, for sure, and they move the cheese a lot.
But, I’ve worked now at companies that use alternatives to these, and I really missed the functionality and speed that both Jira and Confluence provided.
What features of a tool aren’t commonly used but should be?
One I see a lot is teams using ‘Environment variables’ in Postman, when ‘Collection variables’ would suffice.
The Environment variables list then becomes a massive list of unmanageable items.
It seems ‘Collection variables’ are a little bit more hidden, but I find using them is cleaner - it encourages users to create and set variables only when they are needed.
Collection variables are also baked in when you export the collection. This saves a lot of hassle when trying to use something like Newman to test with - you don’t have to consider all the environment variables.
What tool are you familiar with that isn’t talked about enough in the community?
I use James Bachs perlclip tool quite often.
It’s just a perl script that will generate strings or sets of strings for you - it’s particularly useful when I need, say, a string exactly 1000 characters long.