API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

Service integration can be a pain when providers of APIs don't have visibility into how they're being consumed. Evolving their APIs can be a slow, painful process. When a contract breaking change is released, API consumers may not find out until in production, which integration point failed and why.

Contract Tests are lightweight, easy to maintain, and quick at detecting breaking changes in API contracts. Even better are Consumer-Driven Contract Tests (CDCTs), that help consumers build their integrations based on provider contracts they expect. Serving these contracts to providers enable their creators evolve their APIs while complying with consumers' specifications.

This talk will cover reasons to practice CDCTs, how to write, version and test contracts from both consumer and provider perspectives using Pact, a cross-platform polyglot framework, and how to incorporate CDCTs in a deployment pipeline.