Challenges:

• Speed of feedback
• Reliability of feedback
• Managing unowned dependencies

"Any advantage you gain by talking to the real system is overwhelmed by the need to stamp out non-determinism"
Martin Fowler

"Push tests as low as they can go for the highest return in investment and quickest feedback"
Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin

Decomposing what we do:

1. Connectivity - Mocks and Smoke Testing
2. Conversation - Contract Testing
3. Conduct - Contracts, Monitoring, User Journeys

Does this build satisfy the consumer's contracts?

During CI...

1. 📜 Retrieve mainline contract for each consumer
2. 🧪 Start service (mock upstream dependencies)
3. 🚀 Launch Pact mock client
4. ✔️ Verify service's responses against contract
5. 💾 Upload verification results to Broker

When a new consumer contract is published...

1. ⚡ Special CI provider job triggered by Broker
2. ✔️ Runs provider verification against new contract
3. 💾 Upload verification result to Broker

Pre-

              
pact-broker can-i-deploy
  --pacticipant=pact-consumer
  --version=$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
  --to-environment=production
              
            

Post-

              
pact-broker record-deployment
  --pacticipant=pact-consumer
  --version=$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
  --environment=production
              
            

Deploy consumer (when provider isn't deployed)

Deploy provider

Deploy consumer

Deploy consumer (with unsupported changes)