Contract Testing - CI/CD Glossary Definition
Contract testing checks that a service consumer and provider honor an agreed message contract.
Contract testing verifies that two services agree on the shape of the messages they exchange by testing each side against a shared contract, without running both together.
Consumer-driven contract testing, as in Pact, lets the consumer define expectations that the provider must satisfy. It catches breaking API changes without full end-to-end setups.
In CI
Each service runs its side of the contract independently, so a provider pipeline can fail fast when a change would break a consumer.
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