Sparrow - The Open Source API Testing Tool For All Developers

@joshi_rahul @astitvapatle @itsmdasifraza @uvkewate Thanks Yuvraj for putting time on putting such a detailed feedback as well as for your questions. Let me answer them here: Collaboration and team features - We were supposed to launch 2-3 months back and one of the primary reason why our release was delayed was Sparrow Active Sync functionality. One primary reason where all API testing tools fail is keeping collections in sync with the code base without manual intervention. This is where Active Sync comes in picture. It is baked into Sparrow but not enabled yet as we are still testing it to ensure this is something that solves problem for everyone. The way it works is it will ask you where your code base is hosted locally and automatically identify a local OAS URL. After that everything is automated. It will automatically add new APIs as they are built or as you pull them from your repo also keeping track of different git branches. Security and governance - We believe a dev tool should make devs a better dev. So yes! it is extremely important that we give feedback to users on their APIs and share best practices. Very basic version of this is already in place inside Sparrow when you try out different APIs you get suggestion in terms of not right way to use POST body, authentication, parameters, etc. But it is not just limited to that, in our future roadmap we are planning to utilize Sparrow AI which is already part of the application to give automatic suggestions. You can try that today when an API is open, if you ask Sparrow AI on best practices it will assist you with changes. The above paragraph doesn't talk about governance for which we are introducing self hostable version of Sparrow. Where enterprise can host their own Sparrow server and ensure that nothing goes outside their vicinity. Next sprint we are also launching Sparrow for Web where you don't need to install the application to use it. If you are having your own sparrow server, all the APIs will be routed via that server as proxy only and can log all the requests that are getting made internally. This also solves one more problem of not having to expose APIs outside of a closed network for someone to use which causes security vulnerabilities. The feedback related to compliance check and vulnerability is well taken, thanks for it. We will definitely focus on it and try to have admin dashboard in place for enterprise. On other feedbacks - All of the feedbacks are really insightful and will help in shaping the tool in future. Git and Postman integrations are already WIP, others we will definitely put in our backlog. We are setting up our support channels currently so stay tuned to see it on the website. Thanks again for such great suggestions. 😊

@shaily_agrawal thank you for the feedback.

@school_4_ants Hey Hunter, currently not. But we see lot of people are interested in it. We want to make sure whatever we do it doesn't have steep learning curve associated with it. So that's where we will RnD a little bit to ensure our approach is not overwhelming for new people while also providing power to professionals. Thanks for the upvote. :)

@gauravc12 Who are you making this for if not professional developers? I'd recommend looking at Postman's Newman and Bruno as reference for CLI usage.

@school_4_ants being professional devs ourselves, we don't want to overwhelm them with one more script and syntax that they have to learn. There can be better way to handle it that I am sure we will figure it out. 🙂

@pradeepsoundararajan Thank you for all the wishes.

@tetyemezz yes please do try and give feedback. Thank you

@amit_arora Thanks Amit. Please give it a try and do give your feedback. Over the last 10 years and more since we started our development journey, we have been using multiple API testing tools. Last decade Postman helped lot of devs like us to become better devs and ease our lives while speeding up testing cycles. But with evolving needs there are some major challenges that devs are facing which we heard from others during our validation phase and faced ourselves as well. That's why we came up with something that is faster built with recent technologies and framework, open source and self hostable. There are some great API testing tools in market but unfortunately nobody is focussing on team collaboration and focussing on improving delivery speed. That's where Sparrow comes in. Our core objective is to improve collaboration and testing quality. You will hear more about some amazing things planned in that direction soon from us as we ship more tailored features.