Mock Everything: How We Gave Up Real Integrations and Defeated Instability

In this talk, we share the practical experience of a backend team that completely abandoned real integrations in automated testing and switched to total mocking of all external REST API and Kafka dependencies. We take a detailed look at the reasons behind this shift, the technical solutions we used, as well as the challenges the team faced and how we resolved them. We will show how to achieve high stability of integration and end-to-end tests using WireMock, Kafka mocking, parallel JUnit runs, and a controlled environment. Attendees will learn how to implement this approach, what risks to watch out for, and what advantages it provides.