Practical contract testing with Pact

Contract testing is an approach that addresses the challenges of large-scale integration and E2E testing in distributed systems. It is not a new technique, in fact, it has been around for several years now, but unfortunately there aren't many good introductions, examples and use cases that clearly show the added value of contract testing, and how it can help speed up integration testing.

This course is designed to change that. Through hours of videos, quizzes and hands-on programming exercises, you will learn everything you need to know about contract testing, Pact and the tools in the Pact ecosystem.

So, what can you expect from this course? Here's the course outline for you:

• The context for this course
• The current testing process and its challenges

• What is a contract?
• What is contract testing?
• How is contract testing different from other approaches to integration testing?
• How is contract testing different from schema validation?
• Where does contract testing fit into your testing strategy?
• Different approaches to contract testing

• Introducing Pact and the Pact ecosystem
• Introducing the Pact CI/CD implementation guide

• What goes into a consumer contract?
• Preparing your machine for the hands-on exercises
• Generating a consumer contract
• Defining provider states
• Dealing with optional fields

• Introducing the Pact Broker
• Publishing our contracts using the Pact CLI tools
• Publishing our contracts using the Pact Maven plugin
• Consumer contract versioning

• Provider-side contract verification
• Publishing provider verification results
• Exploring the Pact verifier logs

• Generate and publish consumer contracts in your pipeline
• Verify contracts and publish verification results in your pipeline
• Using webhooks

• What does can-i-deploy do?
• Adding can-i-deploy to your pipeline

• Introducing a change as a consumer
• Branches and pending pacts
• Updating the provider implementation

Consumer-driven contract testing implementation challenges

• Consumer-driven contract testing implementation challenges

Bidirectional contract testing (available for Java, other languages coming soon)

• The bidirectional contract testing flow
• Generating and publishing consumer contracts
• Publishing provider contracts and verification by PactFlow
• Bidirectional or consumer-driven contract testing?

• Tips on getting started with contract testing

Additional material and resources

• The Pact plugin framework
• Generating Pact code with AI
• The Pact Slack channel

As you can see, there's something in there for everyone. Are you ready to learn about contract testing? Let's get started!