Lately, I’ve been trying to get a grip of what contract testing is and how different is it from API testing. Contract testing is the latest talked about approach which is basically writing some code to check API response schemas and codes. In some cases you’d be checking the request payload as well…

I agree that it is a tool in your toolbox. How often do you need to maintain a relationship between a provider API and many consumer’s APIs? I wonder at what scale is that worth the effort?

[image] alanmbarr: How often do you need to maintain a relationship between a provider API and many consumer’s APIs? What if someone did it, not very often?

There’s a fundamental difference between the two. First, API testing is not a real thing. Or at least, in the way it’s commonly used it isn’t - it’s just testing a product that happens to expose a RESTful (or other) API. You rarely hear of people testing the API itself as opposed to testing the app…

Thanks for the detailed answer Amit. I think I’ll give Pact a shot some time too. But for now since the API is already there and has been since the past couple of years. I think an automated API check would make more sense for me.

That’s sounds reasonable - the main motivation for contract tests is when you are developing both sides of the contract and want fast feedback before deploying it to a full system test. example of why we are starting to do this: We are creating a service based product, that interacts with a web-se…

Consumer-driven contract testing is more about decoupling the working methods and the services themselves from the state of the finished development when developing services. In addition, the word “consumer” is based on the fact that the provider can fulfil the necessary requirements of the consumer…

I implemented contract testing recently in a microservices environment where teams provided APIs for each other. It worked well. I probably wouldn’t implement it unless you’re crossing team boundaries - it’s quite a lot of overhead. In our case we had some outages which were caused by violated cont…

Any links you can provide? I would see alternatives to pact.

So, I jury rigged a home grown solution using github actions, pydantic, hypothesis and a library called hypothesis-jsonschema. I used: Pydantic to generate jsonschema from a python class representing a consumer and a producer. A script in github actions which uploaded this jsonschema file to gith…

Contract testing: is it something only for complex high intensity consumer provider architectures?

Discussions

alanmbarr (Alan) 14 June 2024 19:06 9

It could. It’s a promise and you need to know when the promise is broken.

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Contract testing: is it something only for complex high intensity consumer provider architectures?

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