50+ Postman Interview Questions for Your Technical Interview

Postman is one of the most popular API platforms for building, designing, and testing web APIs. If you’re appearing for a software developer interview that involves creating and designing APIs, you can expect a few Postman interview questions about the application’s core features and benefits.

To give you an idea about the type of Postman interview questions asked at technical interviews, we’ve compiled a list of questions to help you with your prep. As such, API modeling is a core systems design concept, so you can typically expect Postman interview questions at systems design interviews.

Postman Interview Questions for Freshers

Freshers aren’t really expected to know systems design concepts in detail. But at developer interviews, you can expect a few basic questions about the software application.

Postman Interview Questions and Answers

Let’s go ahead and look at some common Postman interview questions and answers for freshers.

Q1. What do you understand about collections in Postman?

Collections in Postman are groups of similar requests and essentially help to organize requests in dedicated folders.

Q2. What are some core benefits of using the Postman API platform?

This is one of the most common Postman interview questions for freshers. Some benefits of using the Postman API platform include:

• Postman is equipped to send different types of API requests (such as POST, PUT, PATCH, GET)  based on the requirement.

• Postman helps to save API environments for future deployment.

• It can be integrated with other tools that are used for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

• Postman helps to manage and handle the end-end API life-cycle.

• Postman offers a unique runtime service that specifically helps with managing environments, workspaces, and API collections.

Q3. Which command will you use to log values of variables in Postman?

To log variable values in the Postman console, the command that’s used is:

console.log(pm.variables.get("variable_name"));

Q4. What are some common authorization methods associated with Postman?

Some authorization methods associated with Postman include:

• Bearer Key
• API Token
• OAuth
• AWS Signature
• Hawk Authentication
• Digest Authentication
• Basic Authentication

Q5. What is Basic Authorization used for in Postman?

Again, this is one of the most popular Postman interview questions asked at tech interviews. Basic authorization in Postman is an authorization technique for HTTP agents, such as web browsers.

Sample Postman Interview Questions for Freshers

Let’s look at some sample Postman interview questions for freshers.

1. What do you understand by Digest Authorization in Postman?
2. What are some limitations of Postman?
3. What do you understand about the Postman Monitor?
4. What are Query Params in Postman?
5. What are Path variables in Postman?
6. How do you save API responses to a file?
7. What do you understand about the 301 Status code?
8. Which are the API requests that are supported by Postman?
9. How do you access specific variables in Postman?
10. What do you understand about the term environment in Postman?

Postman Interview Questions for Experienced Programmers and Developers

Experienced programmers generally go through multiple systems design rounds at technical interviews. This means that there is a greater emphasis on API modeling and API design for senior or experienced programmers. To help you understand what type of Postman interview questions are asked of experienced developers, we’ve compiled this list of the most common questions to expect.

This section covers Postman API testing interview questions and Postman REST API interview questions, among other core concepts pertaining to the software application. Let’s take a look.

1. What do you understand about the 304 status code in Postman?
2. Explain the different variable scopes in Postman
3. Explain the different Request methods associated with Postman
4. What is the use of GUID in Postman?
5. Explain the process of writing test cases with basic auth in Postman
6. Explain workspaces in Postman.
7. What is the Pre-request script in Postman?
8. What is a Scratch Pad in Postman? Why is it used?
9. How would you go about using custom JavaScript libraries in Postman?
10. Explain how to generate random numbers within a given range in Postman
11. How do you view Response and Request logs in Postman?
12. What are the primary components of an HTTP response?
13. What is Status Code 201 in Postman?
14. What command will you use to halt execution requests in Postman?
15. Explain some common Status codes in Postman.

These Postman interview questions for freshers and experienced programmers will give you a clear idea of what to expect at your next technical interview.

Postman API Testing Interview Questions

Here are some Postman API testing interview questions to help you prepare for your next technical interview.

Q1. What is Postman, and why is it used?

Postman is a web-based collaboration platform for API development. It provides a multitude of features in the design, building, testing, and documentation of APIs. It makes the testing of APIs easier by providing a user interface for sending HTTP requests, such as GET, POST, or PUT, among others, and analyzing responses.

It is highly adopted because it supports multiple API types, such as REST and SOAP, among others, with extended functionality like automated testing, environments, and collections.

Q2. How do you chain requests in Postman?

Of the many important features supported in Postman, one of them is chaining requests. In simple terms, chaining requests in Postman facilitates a way to have the output of one request be an input for subsequent requests.

This happens by extracting information from the response of a request and storing it into a variable that can be utilized in subsequent requests. For example, you may want to chain requests by pulling a token from a login request to use in the authorization header of the next request.

Q3. What is the difference between Authorization and Authentication?

Authentication is the process of identifying a user, whereas authorization involves permissions a certain authenticated user has to view particular resources. Authentication in Postman can be done through Basic Auth, OAuth, and Bearer tokens, while the authorization is specified by specifying permissions.

Q4. How Do You Manage Sensitive Data Like API Keys In Postman?

In Postman, API keys, among other sensitive data, should be kept in environment variables. That way, no request will have such sensitive information directly hard-coded, which isn't safe. Variables can also be set as secret, which encrypts them. Then you are allowed to export or import your environment files without exposing the actual keys.

Q5. Explain What is Postman Collection and How it is Used.

A Postman Collection is a feature to organize API requests in folders or groups in order to manage related requests much more conveniently. Collections can be shared, reused, and tested with the Collection Runner for automation or data-driven testing. This is the very basic feature necessary for collaboration and systematic API testing.

Postman API Testing Interview Questions for Practice

1. What are the various HTTP request methods available in Postman?
2. How would you work with environment variables in Postman for maintaining different environments?
3. What is a pre-request script in Postman, and when would you use it?
4. How would you handle authentication in Postman, and what are the various methods supported?
5. What is the importance of status codes in API testing, and how do you test them in Postman?
6. How do you execute automated API tests with Postman Collection Runner?
7. What is a Postman monitor, and how does that help in testing an API?
8. How would you extract data from a JSON response within Postman and utilize this in further requests?
9. How does Postman support data-driven testing, and what is the position of Newman in this process?
10. Why should one use Postman to test APIs against the plethora of other tools available?

Tricky Postman Interview Questions For Practice

While Postman interview questions are fairly straightforward, there can be certain tricky questions that may stumble you in the interview.

1. How would you handle dynamic variables across different environments in Postman?
2. What are the ways to debug failed API requests in Postman when error messages are not clear?
3. How would you simulate network throttling or delays in Postman for API performance testing?
4. Explain how you can dynamically use Postman to validate the response schema for different API versions.
5. How would you test, in Postman, against such a complex nested JSON structure and then validate certain values within them?
6. How would you run Postman Collections from the command line using Newman and how would you generate detailed HTML reports?
7. How would you test an API that requires OAuth2 authentication in Postman? How would you handle issues such as token expiration?
8. Describe how to implement a method with which API requests automatically retry their failures in Postman through writing a test script.
9. How would you extract a certain value in the multilayered response payload and use it for subsequent requests?
10. What are some of the limitations of using Postman when working on large-scale API projects? How do you work around these challenges?

These questions will challenge your deep understanding of Postman and API testing strategies regarding advanced features for handling complex test scenarios, debugging, and automation.

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FAQs: Postman Interview Questions

Q1. What is Postman?

Postman is a software application developed to design, build, and test APIs. It can be easily customized to business needs and integrated with popular JavaScript framework libraries.

Q2. What are the core concepts around which Postman interview questions are asked at technical interviews?

Postman interview questions asked at technical interviews are typically around rest APIs, API testing using Postman, API design, authorization techniques, status codes, and commands.

Q3. Are Postman interview questions asked at software developer interviews?

Yes, Postman interview questions are asked at systems design rounds of software engineering interviews as Postman is a widely used software application to build and design APIs.

Q4. In what language is Postman written and developed?

Postman is written and developed using Electron - an open-source JavaScript framework that was originally maintained and developed by GitHub.

Q5. What are some popular tools (aside from Postman) used for API testing?

Some tools used for API testing include - SoapUI, Apigee, Katalon Studio, and Jmeter.

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