Pact – Contract Testing

Module 1: Contract Testing Fundamentals

• Integration test pain in microservices CI pipelines
• Contract testing vs integration testing trade-offs
• Consumer-driven contracts: who defines the contract
• Pact terminology: consumer, provider, pact file, verification
• When to use Pact: use cases and limitations
• Pact ecosystem: JVM, JS, Python, Go, .NET

Module 2: Pact Consumer Tests in Java

• Pact JVM Maven dependency setup
• JUnit 5 Pact consumer test configuration
• PactDslWithProvider: interaction definition DSL
• Verifying consumer tests with mock provider
• Pact file JSON contract generation
• Consumer test best practices

Module 3: Pact Provider Verification

• @Provider annotation for provider identification
• @PactFolder: loading pact files for verification
• @State handlers for provider state setup
• Running provider verification tests
• Interpreting verification failures
• Spring Boot test context for providers

Module 4: Pact Broker

• Centralised contract repository architecture
• PactFlow: hosted Pact Broker option
• Publishing consumer pacts to broker
• Pulling pacts for provider verification
• Can-I-Deploy: deployment safety checks
• Broker webhooks for automated verification

Module 5: Pact for JavaScript

• @pact-foundation/pact npm package setup
• Consumer tests in JavaScript and TypeScript
• Provider verification with Verifier class
• Pact with Axios or fetch HTTP clients
• TypeScript type-safe interaction definitions
• Pact with Jest: consumer and provider setup

Module 6: Message Contract Testing

• Asynchronous messaging challenges for contracts
• Pact message contracts: content and metadata
• Producer message verification via callbacks
• Pact with Kafka: event-driven contracts
• RabbitMQ contract testing patterns
• Message schema evolution management

Module 7: CI/CD Integration

• Consumer publishes, provider verifies workflow
• GitHub Actions: Pact pipelines for both sides
• Can-I-Deploy in deployment gates
• Pact versioning: branch and environment tags
• Pending pacts: avoiding build failures
• WIP pacts for in-progress consumer contracts

Module 8: Advanced Patterns & Strategy

• Pact with GraphQL API testing
• Bi-directional contract testing with PactFlow
• Contract testing maturity model
• Common anti-patterns and how to avoid them
• Building a contract testing culture in teams
• Pact community resources and certifications

Our Pact instructors are microservices engineers and testing architects who have implemented consumer-driven contract testing at scale, helping organisations replace slow integration tests with fast contract verification. They bring distributed systems backgrounds and multi-language Pact implementation experience.