>But the more 'real' the test is, the less of your own test it covers relative to all of the other external dependencies. A strangely underappreciated facet of

>But the more 'real' the test is, the less of your own test it covers relative to all of the other external dependencies. A strangely underappreciated facet of being a more 'real test' is that you catch more 'real' bugs. >should your integration test actually make a (test) request to the real live service endpoints? Ideally you should be able to run your integration test in a mode that mocks it and a mode that calls the real live service so that you can see problems in your code and (and avoid brittleness) and problems with the service, and distinguish them.