But not everyone is a programmer or has time to learn a new framework. There are plenty of great data mocking libraries available for almost every language and platform. Testing with realistic data will make your app more robust because you'll catch errors that are likely to occur in production before release day. Real data is varied and will contain characters that may not play nice with your code, such as apostrophes, or unicode characters from other languages. When you demonstrate new features to others, they'll understand them faster. When your test database is filled with realistic looking data, you'll be more engaged as a tester. Worse, the data you enter will be biased towards your own usage patterns and won't match real-world usage, leaving important bugs undiscovered.

If you're hand-entering data into a test environment one record at a time using the UI, you're never going to build up the volume and variety of data that your app will accumulate in a few days in production. In production, you'll have an army of users banging away at your app and filling your database with data, which puts stress on your code.

If you're developing an application, you'll want to make sure you're testing it under conditions that closely simulate a production environment. Paralellize UI and API development and start delivering better applications faster today! Why is test data important? With Mockaroo, you can design your own mock APIs, You control the URLs, responses, and error conditions. By making real requests, you'll uncover problems with application flow, timing, and API design early, improving the quality of both the user experience and API. It's hard to put together a meaningful UI prototype without making real requests to an API. Mock your back-end API and start coding your UI today.

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