Case study

Jumia uses WireMock Cloud to parallelize development and reduce feature development time by more than three weeks

Find out how Jumia implements WireMock in their engineering teams’ testing and development workflow for shorter release cycles.

Client

Joao Falcao

Chief Technology Officer
Jumia

Jumia is a technology company that delivers advertisement, data, marketplace, payment and logistic services across Africa.

Challenge

Jumia experienced development bottlenecks when mobile and back-end teams had to work in sequence/isolation around APIs that were still in development.

Solution

Jumia chose WireMock Cloud as a reliable API testing and development tool to streamline workflows across mobile development, backend development, and quality assurance teams.

Results

Jumia reduces the development time of new features by more than three weeks as WireMock helps parallelize the mobile and back-end development teams’ workflows.

Region

Africa

Industry

eCommerce, web services

Goal

Increase release velocity by parallelizing work between mobile and backend development teams

Background

Jumia is a technology company that delivers digital services across Africa. Jumia has a wide range of business units, some of their main products including advertisement, data, marketplace, payments and logistic services.

Agibank’s digital footprint includes 14 online channels where they can offer products such as credit, investments, and insurance.Their technology team consists of 400 people, with 40 engineering squads and supporting teams such as infrastructure, site reliability engineers, and security teams.

Challenge

Develop new features that depend on work-in-progress APIs.

Even though mobile and backend engineering teams were working closely, their workflows were separate and this led to misalignments and delays in shipping new features. The mobile team had to instruct the backend engineers on the APIs, fields and responses they needed, and the backend teams would enter a sprint to develop the APIs. Upon completion, if the mobile team would require further changes to the APIs, they had to make another request to the backend team, creating a development bottleneck and long feedback cycles.

Jumia were looking for a solution to help them:

Parallelize work between mobile and backend engineering teams
Ensure the availability of staging and testing environments with minimum effort
Manage code versions across environments
Adjust the security and authentication controls of staging environments

“WireMock is awesome because we can shorten our feature release lifecycle by three weeks, and we can have the mobile development and backend development teams working in parallel.”

Joao Falcao

Chief Technology Officer, Jumia

“After defining the API responses we can either directly start development on mobile and backend lines in parallel, or continue to iterate directly into WireMock Cloud without spending one single line of code within PHP or Java. This is one of the aspects that allowed us to move faster.”early on.”

Joao Falcao

Chief Technology Officer, Jumia

Solution

Need

Jumia deployed WireMock Cloud as a mock API server, offering developers an always-on API service instead of relying on their internal staging and integration environments. WireMock also helps Jumia manage changes to software code to ensure that teams can validate new functionalities on the correct code deployments.

Jumia uses WireMock as part of their ideation and development workflows, enabling engineers to define the API calls and payloads without writing any code. With the mock API calls, the mobile engineering teams can use the responses in their implementations as soon as defined, while the backend developers have an exact requirement list to work toward.

To improve the quality assurance workflow, Jumia uses WireMock Cloud to lower the authentication and security barriers as these requests are not creating any sort of data into a database, making it easier for manual quality assurance specialists to hit the APIs.

Results