How Mindera uses Requestly for proactive API Management

Mindera is a global technology company with people at its heart, specialising in software engineering and consulting. Mindera engages in software development and consultancy services to plan, build, and deliver solutions to improve client business. Recently, Mindera has incorporated a powerful open source and web debugging tool, Requestly, in some of its projects, to optimise workflows, minimise downtime and solve some of the development challenges it was facing. It’s played a pivotal role and has transformed workflows, particularly for dynamic request mocking, testing, and collaborative API work.

Challenge

The team faced challenges managing the API dependency between frontend and backend developers. The frontend developers often had to either wait for the backend developers to make the API available or hardcode the response on the client side during the API development phase. Testing the UI for all possible scenarios required a range of hacks and workarounds because there was no straightforward solution to emulate different responses from the same API endpoint. As a result, frontend developers often resort to hard-code JSON from backend developers while developing the UI. 

This process was not only time-consuming, but also required considerable dialogue between the frontend and backend developers. Moreover, the process of integrating these responses into the client code or using a mocking tool for development/debugging had to be repeated after every new feature introduction or bug fix, further postponing the delivery timeline for the end user. 

Solution

Mindera’s backend team uses Requestly’s API client to construct and test APIs and uses Requestly’s Mock Server to disseminate the API mocks within the Shared Workspace, thus enabling the frontend team to use the mocks until the API is deployed. This restructured process allows Front-end developers to test out UI features without having to wait for backend deployment. Now instead of hardcoding JSON in the code, the team defines the JSON in the Requestly Modify API Response rule and keeps it there forever, no more removing it before creating pull requests or hacking around their code base.

With Requestly, the team has greatly improved its development process, significantly enhancing productivity and reducing the deployment cycle. Requestly has swiftly become integrated and plays an influential role as an indispensable tool in the Mindera team’s daily operations, especially when dealing with complex cases that require dynamic and proactive request mocking.