We have a product that integrates with several-dozen third party applications. Our developers and testers sign up for free trial accounts with the third-parties so that we can validate that the integration workflow our users would go through will work properly after deployments are made. Some of the third-parties have very short free-trial periods, of up to 7 days.
Our QA team spends a considerable amount of time managing test credentials for these third-parties. Every week, a new set of free trial accounts need to be created in order to test the integration workflows.
We’ve considered the following options:
Contact the third parties and reach out to them and see if they’d grant us a permanent free-trial account for testing purposes.
Pay for the smallest plan every month to avoid needing to manage rotating the credentials.
Automate the process of refreshing the credentials.
I’m sure this is a common issue faced by many businesses with the amount of app marketplaces and integration opportunities that exist today. What’s the best way to manage these third-party test credentials that minimizes maintenance and manual effort?
Note that I’m not talking about test credentials for our app. This is test credentials for third-party apps that our app integrates with.
