Concerned about the slow progress of your Development Team?

 Published on 11/08/2021

Are you leading a team of software engineers?

Are you a Product Owner, Project Manager or a Delivery Manager?

Are you a Leader working with multiple Teams?

If you fall into the any one of the above mentioned roles then the next question is:

Are you concerned about the slow progress of your Team?


If slow pace of development is concerning you then have you tried identifying the reasons? There are many reasons why a team starts falling behind schedule. One of the reasons is that the product is usually divided into smaller, more manageable components, modules, microservices and layers and assigned to different teams specializing in building them.

The teams do well in the beginning as they are focused on laying the foundation and building the core functionalities of their application components. However, the individual components don’t stay isolated forever and the time comes to integrate them together to build the final product. This is where the dependencies between the teams start increasing. This is also the development phase where many teams start falling behind the schedule.

It is also common to be in a situation where teams have competing priorities. Should Team A build the feature that unblocks Team B or the feature that allows Team C to get the data that they need to move forward?

The usual way of managing these competing priorities and bringing the project back on schedule is having meetings, meetings between teams and meetings up and down the organizational hierarchy.

While the meetings to unblock teams are underway, something else that needs the attention also has to be ignored because it isn’t behind schedule, yet!

As a leader, is there anything else you can do other than meeting and re-reviewing and re-prioritizing features, stories, defects and deliverables? Are there any tools available that your teams can utilize to either unblock themselves or other teams without making last minute changes to their development sprints?

If your development teams are relying on HTTP / REST API for integrations between components and microservices then API Virtualization or API mocking might be a way for teams to stay productive while they are waiting on the other team to deliver the required feature.

REST API Virtualization (or mocking) is simple and easy to work with in situations where the development team understands the API contract or specifications.

Development Teams can utilize virtual (mock) APIs to:

  • Speed-up development — Teams can unblock themselves or their API Consumers
  • Parallelize development — Team developing the API(s) and the Team consuming the API(s) can work in parallel after the API specs are agreed upon
  • Improve API experience — Team developing the API can utilize virtual APIs to provide scenarios that are known but can’t be easily served by the real API because of limited data or if the data requires repeated setup and configuration after each consumption
  • Design API Integrations — Teams can work with virtual APIs during the design phase as virtual APIs don’t require any coding and it may be more convenient to quickly create and launch a functioning API during discussions
  • Simplify Integration Testing — Teams tasked with testing service integrations can also take advantage of virtual APIs to reproduce complex test cases and scenarios consistently
  • Feature Demos — Demonstrating the features you have built isn’t possible because one or more APIs in the flow aren’t ready yet? Virtual APIs can step-in and provide the inputs needed to demonstrate the feature end-to-end

Feel free to contact us at info@apioncloud.com to learn more or watch the 50 seconds video below to see how quickly can a virtual API be created, launched and interacted with.