Forcing developers to deal with mocks right from the beginning is critical in my opinion. Unit testing as part of your CI/CD flow needs to be a first priority

Forcing developers to deal with mocks right from the beginning is critical in my opinion. Unit testing as part of your CI/CD flow needs to be a first priority rather than something that gets thought of later on. Testing locally should be synonymous with running your unit test suite. Doing your integration testing deployed to a non-production cloud environment is always necessary but should never be a requirement for doing development locally.