Removing the need for large scale E2E testing with consumer-driven contract tests

Bas Dijkstra, Director of International Academy - Inspired Testing

Monoliths are dead. Or, at the very least, they are quickly going the way of the dinosaur. Modern applications are built out of loosely coupled, independent components (i.e., microservices) that communicate with one another through standardized protocols and message formats (HTTP, REST, …).

While this is a blessing for software development, as it enables quick deployments and parallel development, among other things, it does pose some additional challenges in terms of integration and E2E testing. At all times, you want to be informed about whether all of the components and services that make up your application can still communicate with one another. Setting up large scale test environments for all of these components, either using ‘the real thing’ or stubs, can quickly become a Herculean task.

Contract testing is an approach that is meant to address these challenges of large-scale integration and E2E testing in distributed environments. In this talk, you'll learn how contract testing makes the traditionally synchronous activity of E2E testing asynchronous and what this means for your integration and E2E testing efforts. You'll also see a short demo of Pact, one of the most popular tools to perform Consumer-Driven Contract Testing.