API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

"An API specification is a contract representing the developer’s guarantee of an APIs behavior to its consumers. Now, anyone can have an API specification. But just having one is not enough. To be useful, a specification needs to be true, the implementation must be aligned and the developer held to their contract.

Specification standards, like OpenAPI, are popular for documenting an API. But, even with a standardized specification the same rule applies: to be useful, a specification and its implementation must always be aligned.

Rather than add specification maintenance to your to-do list, make it part of your workflow, make it part of your tests. We will explore specification-based testing with OpenAPI and some projects that aim to help make this idea a first-class part of the API development lifecycle."