FreeWill increases release velocity and quality by adopting API mock-based development and testing
Learn how the FreeWill team is using WireMock Cloud to improve development testing against financial APIs, without slowing down production.
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Client
FreeWill is the largest U.S. provider of online estate planning tools.
Challenge
FreeWill’s software interacts with systems used to transfer money, crypto, or stocks. To increase end-to-end test coverage without causing issues for their partners, FreeWill’s developers wanted to start using mock endpoints for these APIs.
Solution
WireMock Cloud provides a mature solution for mocking Freewill’s 3rd party API dependencies. It also enables the team to parallelize development and testing using discrete Lambda-like endpoints for each rather than relying on a single, shared Lambda.
Results
- 19 mock APIs used to accelerate development
- Issues in previously untested areas, which could take up to 3 pull requests to resolve. are now resolved within a single PR
- Fewer bugs escaping on every PR due to higher test coverage
FreeWill is the largest U.S. provider of online estate planning tools. They are able to offer these tools at no cost through their work with thousands of non-profits who recognize the impact of asking Americans to consider bequests and other non-cash gifts to charity as part of their legacy.
Increasing end-to-end test coverage for 3rd party APIs and dev environments
FreeWill’s software interacts with systems that transfer money, cryptocurrency, or stocks. To increase end-to-end test coverage without causing issues for their partners, FreeWill’s developers wanted to start using mock endpoints for these APIs (rather than hitting the live endpoints).
A separate challenge was around the lack of discrete environments that would allow for parallel testing. Due to reliance on a single shared AWS Lambda endpoint, correlating a given request to an origin environment was very difficult to achieve.
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“Working with WireMock Cloud allows us to develop new features and maintain our existing features with a high degree of confidence.”
WireMock Cloud provides a mature mocking platform for testing and development
FreeWill chose WireMock Cloud after having a positive experience with open source WireMock. They compared it to alternatives and found that WireMock Cloud provides a more mature product for mocking their 3rd party API dependencies.
WireMock Cloud is now used to mock 19 APIs the Freewill team relies on during testing and development. Their solution for the Lambda use case was to use a separate WireMock mock API for each environment, effectively providing a unique Lambda for each test environment.
Less bugs and more efficient developers
- Issues in previously untested areas, which could take up to 3 pull requests to resolve are now resolved within a single PR
- Fewer bugs escaping on every PR due to higher test coverage
After successfully implementing WireMock Cloud for its initial use cases, FreeWill is looking to expand their front-end development and testing by using WireMock stubs to stand in for the not-yet-available backend. This will allow them to parallelize development and increase efficiency in their development lifecycle.
FreeWill also plans to use WireMock Cloud’s new open API validation features to further increase the quality of the software they release.
“Open API validation could help us understand when an API changes and catch more bugs.”
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