You have a Spring Boot application that integrates with several external services. How would you structure your tests to ensure that the interactions with external services are correctly handled, without actually interacting with the real services during the tests?

To ensure correct handling of interactions with external services, you would use mock objects or libraries like WireMock to simulate the responses of external services. This approach allows you to control the behavior of the external services during testing without actually making real requests. Live testing against real external services is not recommended in automated testing as it introduces dependencies and can be unreliable. Skipping testing interactions or relying solely on documentation is not a robust testing strategy.