Thank you, that makes sense and <i>why</i> TDD is so worthwhile for me to start with.<p>For external services (I rarely write code that doesn&#x27;t rely on at least one SOAP endpoint) is there any alternative to mocking the service and the response data? And then should your tests also verify that the remote service works according to its contract?<p>As it would affect data in the live system, I cannot think of a way to safely do it, but 3rd party systems have &#x27;changed&#x27; their behaviours before now, and that&#x27;s a horrible bug to track down.