In a world of distributed systems, microservices, and fast-paced deployments, integration failures are still a leading cause of production issues. End-to-end tests are often too slow, flaky, and expensive to be your safety net.
This talk introduces contract testing with Pact as a practical, scalable alternative that lets teams define and verify API expectations early, independently, and reliably. We’ll walk through the concept of executable agreements—living contracts between services that are validated automatically in CI, catching mismatches before they reach production. We’ll see how contract testing fits into modern development workflows, how it complements unit and integration tests, and why it fosters better collaboration between teams.

Devoxx

A conference talk transcript covering Pact, a consumer-driven contract testing framework. The speaker explains the motivation for contract testing as an alternative to expensive end-to-end tests in microservice architectures, walks through core Pact concepts (consumer, provider, pact broker, can-I-deploy), and demonstrates a TypeScript-based workflow. The talk also shares 18 months of real-world adoption experience across 10 services, covering CI/CD integration, team collaboration benefits, debugging challenges, and guidance on when Pact is and isn't the right fit.

Executable Agreements: Code, Collaborate, and Deploy with Confidence by Dr. Dimitris Dranidis