We’re pleased to announce the highly anticipated launch of Bi-Directional Contract Testing, a Pactflow exclusive feature enabling new modes of contract capture and compliance, a broader set of use cases, and a simplified developer experience to supercharge your contract testing journey.
Bi-Directional Contract Testing helps teams speed up their adoption of contract testing allowing more team members to get involved and faster time to value.
Why we created it
From the beginning, Pactflow was closely and solely aligned to the popular Open Source Pact framework facilitating consumer driven contract testing. With no signs of slowing, this practice is a proven way to increase developer confidence, deploy faster, reduce issues in production and decrease testing costs. However, like most development practices, there’s no silver bullet and some users experience barriers to scaling up for success. Read more about these barriers.
As a team who enjoy drinking our own champagne—and being as close to the Pact community as we are—we were aware of some of the pains and sought a methodology and framework to solve some challenges. These included: level of technical learning and investment, only suitable for team members working in the source code and only suitable for certain architectures, classes of problems and for API first design workflows.
So, we expanded the breadth of contract testing capabilities beyond the popular Pact framework, to enable new modes of contract capture and compliance, a broader set of use cases, and a simplified developer experience.
The core premise of Bi-Directional Contract Testing is that more team members can get involved, using their favourite tools to implement a powerful contract-testing solution with the support of Pactflow.
This feature is available to every Pactflow user on every plan, helping them:
- Lower the barriers to getting started
- Enable rapid scale of contract testing coverage across all systems
- Allow roles, other than developers, such as testers, to take part
- Use flexible implementation or both consumer or provider driven workflows
- Access more technologies to solve for additional classes of problems
- See value and ROI of contract testing faster
What makes Pactflow even better now is that you can forget about having to support provider states for your consumers—parties can be truly independent on their testing processes.- Senior Backend Engineer @ HealthTech Startup
How it works
With Bi-Directional Contract Testing any member of the development team—whether provider side or consumer side—can initiate and partake in contract testing using existing tools. With plug-and-play adapters for common tools such as Cypress, Wiremock and Postman, developers, testers and more can produce and validate contracts for the entire system in minutes all within the comfort of their Pactflow account.
How to get started
1. Visit the feature page
See all the benefits and read the positive feedback from our early access customers - visit the feature page.
2. Understand how it works
Before you get your hands on the tools, get comfortable with how Bi-Directional Contract Testing works - read the docs.
3. Complete the workshop and get set up
Complete the workshop to understand how to implement a Bi-Directional Contract Testing workflow end-to-end, including integration with your CI/CD system - complete the workshop.
Need some help? Visit #pactflow in the Pact Slack community or submit a support ticket.
