Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Ruminating on Consumer Driven Contracts

One of my teams has successfully implemented the paradigm of consumer driven contracts in a recent digital transformation program. We were very happy with the Pact framework and the OOTB integration available in Java (Spring Boot).

Anyone still not convinced on using Consumer Driven Contracts should peruse the below link without fail - https://docs.pact.io/faq/convinceme

The fundamental advantage of  Consumer Driven Contracts is that only parts of the API that are actually used by the consumer get tested. Hence any provider behavior not used by current consumers is free to change without breaking tests.
When you are about to change the contract of a popular API, you can quickly check which consumers would be affected and where to focus your efforts on.

It is important to remember that Pact should not be used for functional testing...it is to be used only for contract adherence. Pact can also be integrated into your CI-CD process, wherein you run all the consumer contracts as part of the build. 

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