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When you are doing e2e tests for your application, you want to test the whole application, not some portions of it like unit tests or integration testing.

But in some situations, people do mock APIs.
For example, when you have a massive microservice as your back-end, which makes your e2e tests very slow, or beside your own API, you rely on other third-party APIs, which makes your e2e tests fail occasionally.
So you only want to make sure that your front-end application works well, what should you do?

In my company, we have a massive system with a really heavy database which makes e2e testing very ineffective. Is it right to mock APIs in such a scenario?

Shadowalker
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1 Answers1

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My understanding here is that if you want to test only your front-end application (what is not E2E testing in my opinion) you can use unit tests instead. If you still want to test the user interface from the browser, then you can mock the APIs' responses, but still not being E2E testing. In case you want to perform an end-to-end testing, then you shouldn't mock any database or API call. The exception here is a third-party API that is not under your control. In that specific case you can mock it to have less external dependency in your tests, but if that third party changes and you are not aware of it, you wont't notice if it's mocked. Said that, if you mock third-party APIs be sure you have a fluent communication with the API provider to get alerts on changes before your app fails.

Seba
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