Case study

OVO Energy accelerates its development and testing pipelines by adopting WireMock Cloud for running customer journeys

Learn how the OVO Energy team is using WireMock Cloud to improve stability and overcome unreliability roadblocks experienced with third-party APIs

Client

OVO Energy is a major energy and gas supplier in the UK, providing services to more than 680,000 customers.

Challenge

Overcome sporadic instability issues and general unreliability when developing and testing against third-party APIs.

Solution

OVO adopted WireMock Cloud to provide an environment for stable development against unstable third-party APIs.

Results

OVO’s engineering team now has a stable development and testing environment where they can focus on their work and make better progress.

Daily integration tests running against WireMock Cloud mocks.
Significant efficiencies achieved in dev workflows.

Region

Industry

Energy

Goal

Improve stability when developing and testing against third-party APIs.

Background

OVO Energy is a UK-based, privately backed energy supplier. Following its acquisition of SSE in 2020, it became a constituent of the ‘Big Six’.

OVO Energy is a UK-based, privately backed energy supplier. Following its acquisition of SSE in 2020, it became a constituent of the ‘Big Six’. OVO’s operations serve a customer base of more than 680,000 and include a variety of subsidiaries, including Home Telecom, Spark Energy, and its charity arm, OVO Foundation. OVO also supplies products such as heat pumps, EV charging plans, boiler services, and broadband through its SSE brand.

Challenge

Overcome the instability of third-party integrations in OVO’s test suite.

OVO provides its customers with many different services on its website via third-party integrations. These include up-to-date information on energy tariffs, which are set centrally by UK energy regulator Ofgem, and broadband tariffs, in addition to information from water providers and local authorities.

As OVO’s engineering team implemented these into their development workflows, they frequently ran into reliability issues. Many of the third-party APIs they worked with were nowhere near stable or reliable enough to run integration tests against because the third-party providers regularly took down their dev environments or provided sandboxes that were poorly maintained.

This prevented OVO’s engineering team from running customer journeys and other vital process simulations in non-production environments. This problem was compounded by OVO needing to run these processes repeatedly.

“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.”

Technology & Engineering Lead

OVO Energy

Solution

WireMock Cloud for automated API prototyping

OVO’s engineering team searched for a solution that would allow them to run integration tests against these unstable third-party APIs without suffering from the stability roadblocks and performance losses experienced in their native test suite and when using third-party dev environments.

After trying out a popular API development platform and finding that it didn’t fit their needs, one of OVO’s test automation engineers suggested WireMock—and it was an instant success. OVO eventually decided to run with the WireMock Cloud instead of open-source WireMock to leverage its managed service and no-code mocking features.

Results

Seamless development and better collaboration

WireMock Cloud enabled OVO to begin running nightly automation tests against mock APIs through a simpler workflow. According to OVO, as soon as it was deployed, WireMock Cloud allowed them to efficiently work through their daily testing requirements efficiently.

Over time, OVO worked with WireMock to set up a dedicated testing environment where its engineering team could collaborate and focus on projects without the worry of instability standing in the way of progress.