[hrabago]

I did this on a smaller scale within our SOA environment. We're told our DEV must connect to everyone else's DEV. The problem is everybody's DEV is unstable, because by nature, everything deployed there is a work in progress. If someone's service goes down, it can prevent me from testing and block my progress.

So early on when I developed a mock web service which could serve mock data based on the service I was calling. As a result, I always knew what data was available, had coherent data (foreign keys across systems were always valid), and whenever I needed to, I can bring a system down and test my own system's rigidity and error messages. It was great. And then we reengineered all the systems and everything changed.