More non-developers now work with APIs than ever before

A new Postman study found that the use of these interfaces in 2019 went much further than the developer community.

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Postman published his annual “State of the API” report for 2019, which surveyed more than 10,000 people and found that more non-developers than ever use these interfaces daily.

Researchers spoke with thousands of developers, users, testers, and executives to gain a better understanding of how APIs are used in an enterprise.

Fewer than half of all respondents said they were a front-end or back-end developer, which paled in comparison to last year, when almost 60% said they were.

The list of positions that now use APIs in one form or another has been expanded to include QA engineers, technical team leaders, API architects, DevOps specialists and others.

“This year’s survey data shows that the API ecosystem is expanding beyond developers,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman.

“Working directly with APIs has become part of a surprising number of functions, including non-developers such as executives and technical writers, which we find an intriguing trend.”

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API usage also increases in terms of the level of experience of those who work with it. Almost 80% of respondents had less than five years of experience and the largest number of those who spoke with Postman had only one year of experience. About 12% had more than 10 or more years of experience.

The Postman survey also contained a wealth of detailed information about how companies assemble API teams, how many members these teams have, and other information.

“API teams are generally 10 members or less, with nearly three-quarters of individuals indicating that they belong to groups of this size. Large teams are rare; only 1.7% of survey participants reported that 50 people or more to their team, “according to the report.

“When we asked how many respondents work with APIs, we found that 37.3% spend less than 10 hours a week and 35.7% spend 10-20 hours a week. The remaining 27% spend more than 20 hours a week, compared with 31.7% in 2018, “found the survey.

“Interestingly, the part of the population that spends the most time does not shrink because they work less on APIs, but the population as a whole changes – with more new functions and areas joining the API ecosystem,” the study added.

According to the survey, 21% of respondents spend their time developing APIs, while another 22% detect and test APIs manually. About 70% of respondents said they hated spending so much of their time on testing and debugging activities, while preferring to spend resources on designing APIs.

The number of API teams that work with varies greatly, but most survey respondents said they handle between one and five. About 22% work with six to 10 and 13% process 50 or more.

Most respondents said they were working, with 71% learning that they learned by working and asking colleagues. Almost 60% said they read through published API documentation, while using almost the same number of online resources and classes.

According to the research, more than 52% of the APIs are used internally by teams and organizations. There was a slight shift in the number of APIs that are public or shared with partners. For 2019, almost 30% of the APIs used were “shared between integration partners”, while the percentage of time spent on publicly available APIs on the web decreased by 3%.

The survey found that many people were not worried about the security of APIs, despite the almost constant news reports about breaches and hacks. More than half of the respondents described their APIs as “very safe” or “above average security”.

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