What are consumer driven contract tests?

Consumer driven contract testing is a type of contract testing that ensures that a provider is compatible with the expectations that the consumer has of it.

What is contract in contract testing?

Contract testing is a way to ensure that services (an API provider, a client etc.) can communicate with each other. The contract is between a consumer (for example, a client who wants to receive some data from an app) and a provider (for example, an API on a server that provides the data the client needs).

What is a consumer driven contract CDC )?

Consumer Driven Contract Testing (CDC Testing) Consumer-Driven Contracts is an approach to ensure service communication compatibility, in which Consumer and Provider make an agreement about the format of the data they transfter between each other. This agreement forms the so called Contract.

How does contract testing work?

To put it simply — with contract testing, you work with mocks that represent the agreed-upon API contract between the services, but also, the services (or teams really) that provide the API for consumption have to uphold that API contract that is used in those mocks, and the contract is enforced in their CI so they can …

When would you use a contract test?

Use contract-based tests to focus on catching defects:

Within the consumer workflows.
Around misunderstandings regarding endpoint configuration or payload.
When the provider has created breaking changes on endpoints and/or payload.

What is a JSON contract?

In simpler terms, JSON Schema is a contract for your JSON document that defines the expected data types and format of each field in the response. For example, you can create a schema that says your API’s /users endpoint returns a top-level array of objects (eg, users).

What is a Microservice contract?

A microservice API is a contract between the service and its clients. You usually need to incrementally deploy new versions of a service in a way that both old and new versions of a service contract are running simultaneously. Therefore, it’s important to have a strategy for your service versioning.

When should you not use a pact?

What is it not good for? #

Testing APIs where the team maintaining the other side of the integration will not also being using Pact.
Testing APIs where the consumers cannot be individually identified (eg.
Situations where you cannot load data into the provider without using the API that you’re actually testing (eg.

How is contract testing different from API testing?

Contract-based unit tests only check that API endpoint connections are active and functioning correctly. But that’s not all the testing your software application requires. So, before you replace API-based functional tests with contract-based tests, ensure that the tests they execute are duplicates of each other.

Is there going to be consumer driven contract testing?

We’ve decided to bring consumer-driven contract testing back from the archive for this edition even though we had allowed it to fade in the past.

Do you need consumer driven contracts for microservices?

The concept isn’t new, but with the mainstream acceptance of microservices, we need to remind people that consumer-driven contracts are an essential part of a mature microservice testing portfolio, enabling independent service deployments.

Which is the first set of contract tests?

The first set of tests is between the consumer and a provider mock.The consumer service is started up and triggered so that it sends some requests to a provider mock. The provider mock checks if the requests are listed in the contract and reports an error otherwise.

How are mock tests used in contract testing?

Simple mock tests still work though. Instead of two sets of tests (one for testing the provider and one for testing each consumer) you only have one set of tests for testing the provider, since there are no known consumers to test. You just create a mock consumer that represents all the unknown consumers out there to test the provider.

What are consumer driven contract tests?