Part 4 of the Modern API Mocking Series for WireMock
What is the future of API mocking, and how will it fit within the enterprise development landscape?
In our first post of this series, Eric Newcomer introduced API mocking as a methodology for improving developer productivity and quality. Then, I explored how simulation and documentation can ease API onboarding concerns. From there, Eric discussed the use of API mocking to advance software design and solution prototyping cycles.
Now it’s time to think about what happens next. API mocking can become ubiquitous as a practice, much like previous flavors of service virtualization, lab management, and continuous delivery, but then the question to be asked is how will it support software delivery and development work?
Even if API mocking isn’t the ‘main course’ of what a distributed development team cooks up—it is an essential ingredient. Or more precisely, a necessary catalyst for predictably producing good software.
Most of our work hours will still be spent iteratively gathering requirements, coding, testing, deploying, operating, and resolving incidents. However, much like a honeybee affects so many other patterns of the natural ecosystem around it through pollination, from clover, to flowers, and fruiting trees, API mocking may become an essential catalyst for successful software delivery.
Is API mocking in a category of its own?
Perhaps someday the leading analyst firms will put API mocking into its own technology space, replete with a quad-wave matrix report ranking competing vendors, but it’s really not productive to confine it to one bucket.
API mocking is not as easily categorized as other solutions. Yes, it has obvious testing applications, but it’s not a test tool. It can also be a part of continuous delivery and DevOps tool chains, but it’s not a dev tool by itself. It can make mocks from production instances to reproduce incidents, but it’s not really an Ops tool.
Mocks can also certify an interface between trading partners, and contribute to application design, while helping mitigate operational risk with mocks as compliance checks. In essence API mocking is a catalyst for integrating, assuring and governing many other services and technologies, all of which will ultimately be exposed and consumed as APIs.
Here’s just a few of the places we can see API mocking as a future enabler for other advanced practices…
