4 Years On: Requestly Boosts OpenWeb QA

About OpenWeb

OpenWeb provides publishers with an audience-engagement platform that powers real-time conversations on some of the world’s biggest news and entertainment sites. Dozens of micro-services underpin the experience, and every new front-end widget or back-end endpoint must be exercised against production-like traffic before it goes live.

The Challenge

With hundreds of releases a month, OpenWeb’s QA engineers needed an easy way to:

• Toggle traffic between clusters (production, QA, monitoring) without touching application code.
• Preview pre-release JavaScript bundles in a live page while keeping the rest of the site on the current version.
• Inject diagnostic scripts and relax security headers so debugging tools could run in the browser.
• Share those setups with front-end developers so everyone tested the same scenarios.

Hard-coding URLs or shipping “debug” builds slowed the feedback loop and risked leaks to production.

The Solution

OpenWeb standardised on Requestly Workspaces as a shared “traffic switchboard.” Over the years the library has grown to dozens of reusable rules, bundled and version-controlled so anyone can activate them with a click.

When testing new versions, we rely on a set of rules in Requestly to manage bundles, since each bundle has its own version. The build process can be time-consuming, so once a version is ready, we share it across the team using Requestly workspaces. This makes collaboration smooth and efficient—everyone stays aligned and can test the exact same version without confusion

Stav Abeles QA Team Lead at OpenWeb

Engineering need	Requestly rule	Impact
Route API calls to a pre-prod cluster	A Replace rule rewrites production API domains to their pre-production counterparts	QA can test new endpoints in minutes without touching code.
Preview a new JavaScript bundle	Redirect rules swap CDN URLs for a local dev server or a tagged QA asset	Front-end devs validate visual changes before merging.
Mask traffic as another cluster	Modify-header rules override the Host header for selected domains	Canary clusters see authentic traffic patterns without a redeploy.
Load in-house DevTools	A Script-injection rule strips the CSP and inserts a debugging script	Engineers instrument any page on-the-fly.
Silence noisy third-party assets	Block or Redirect rules disable specific ad or launcher scripts during performance tests	Benchmarks stay consistent and readable.

Because Workspaces are shareable links, the front-end team publishes a “QA preset. QA imports it once and stays perfectly aligned all week.

Our team, along with QA and frontend engineers, uses request redirects to test new versions in our environment. This approach allows us to simulate real scenarios by redirecting live requests to our test version. It’s incredibly effective for ensuring everything looks and functions correctly before going live.

Stav Abeles QA Team Lead at OpenWeb

Key Outcome

• Minutes instead of hours – spinning up a full QA environment is now a toggle, not a rebuild.
• Consistent, reproducible tests – every engineer works from the same Workspace, eliminating “works on my machine” bugs.
• Safer roll-outs – teams validate against production traffic without touching live code or DNS.
• Long-term trust – after 4½ years the setup “just works,” freeing engineers to focus on features, not plumbing.

Requestly quietly became the glue between OpenWeb’s fast-moving front end and its equally dynamic back end—turning complex release choreography into a single shared switchboard.