It's a type of testing that verifies that services (such as APIs or microservices) meet the 'contract' they have defined. The contract is a set of agreements on how a service's endpoints should behave, specifying things like request format, response format, and end-point URL, among others.
AiDE API™ can help achieve the following with its consumer-driven contract testing feature:
- Isolation: With contract testing, you can test service A and service B separately. This way, a problem with one service doesn't stop you from testing the other. It encourages decoupling and makes parallel work easier.
- Faster Feedback: Contract testing often forms part of a pipeline of automated tests, providing fast feedback on the quality of the system. The faster you receive feedback about a failure, the quicker it can be fixed.
- Reduction in Integration Issues: It helps in catching issues during the early stages of development, reducing the cost and effort involved in fixing them later.
- Enforces Good Design Practices: Since contract testing requires thinking about the interactions between services upfront, it encourages good design practices like loose coupling and high cohesion.
- Easier Scaling: With contract testing, it's easier to add more services to the system. You don't need to update every service whenever a new one is added; you just need to ensure the new service respects existing contracts.
- Saves Resources: Contract testing can be done with fewer computational resources than end-to-end tests, which require setting up and running the entire system.