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Ask Me Anything

Join an upcoming Ask Me Anything (AMA) session​

There are regular monthly Pact AMAs, currently hosted by Pactflow. At these sessions, you can ask a question and one of their team will answer it. Register for an upcoming AMA in your timezone.

Previous Ask Me Anything recordings​

You can watch all of our previous AMA's in case your questions have already been answered. The questions in each AMA are shown below:

October 2021​

Theme: Test Strategy

Video: https://youtu.be/zKbmpRbPYUg

  1. What is integration testing?
  2. Writing code for testability
  3. Utility of devices such as the testing pyramid to think about crafting a test strategy
  4. The benefits and drawbacks of contract testing
  5. Approaches to removing the need for end-to-end integrated testing

Audience questions:

  1. What are the anti-patterns of contract testing?
  2. What's the best approach to start contract testing with limited resources across multiple services?
  3. What part of existing testing overhead will Pact contract testing replace?

September 2021​

Theme: Case Study: Rolling out Pact/Pactflow at M1 Finance

Video: https://youtu.be/J6-Zi6noqNE

  1. Introduction to M1 finance and case study and existing practices
  2. How did you know contract testing was the right fit for the test automation strategy?
  3. How did you get started with contract testing?
  4. Why did you move to Pactflow?

Audience questions:

  1. Have you found a good approach to adding in pact tests to existing software?
  2. Finance can be a slow moving domain, has pact so far been able to help with trusting a can-i-deploy and not need to plan and schedule manual deployments?
  3. Have you managed to impact time spent running other types of tests as a result? e.g. less e2e tests, greater stability of tests etc.?
  4. Are you seeing benefits in speed of development yet vs overhead of rolling out additional tests to an existing product, or is there still a way to go?

August 2021​

Theme: Contract Testing with Avro

Video: https://youtu.be/75uA3X2lVqo

  1. What is Avro? What is it and what's unique about it?
  2. What are the key use cases for it and benefits of using it?
  3. What are the challenges with Avro, such as evolving the schema?
  4. How do you go about testing Avro?
  5. Where does Pact fit in? Does it make sense to combine them?

July 2021​

Theme: Schema Testing with OpenAPIs

Video: https://youtu.be/O_lXopbrq_Y

  • What are schemas, specifications and contracts?
  • What are the benefits of each and what problems are they trying to solve?
  • Do the concerns overlap (and is that a problem)?
  • How can schemas be combined with contracts to get the most out of each?
  • Integrating these practices with tools such as Postman
  • Experiences / case studies
  • and more

June 2021​

EU/UK​

Video: https://youtu.be/u7LzZ6Fm1Ok

  • What's in store for Pact Specification v4.0?
  • Can you use Pact to test GraphQL APIs?
  • How do I know when I have the right contract-testing coverage?
  • (audience question) When introducing a new interface, what comes first - the consumer or the provider?
  • (audience question) How to extract the resulting pact files from pact-ref-mock-server?
  • (audience question) Do you recommended to include in contract tests query string filters, pagination, etc.? Or are theses general features we take for granted that should be covered by unit tests only?

North America​

Video: https://youtu.be/VnOy9Sv9Opo

  • How does Pending Pacts work?
  • How does WIP Pacts work?
  • Understanding webhooks - how they work, the event cycle and debugging them
  • (audience question) Can users be synced with Google? Can users be part of multiple teams?
  • (audience question) Should we have multiple brokers (e.g. 1 per project) or is this something the Teams feature addresses?
  • (audience question) How does Pact work with IoT solutions?
  • (audience question) What are the SLAs for Pactflow SaaS? Are there enterprise options?

May 2021​

APAC​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97UA4E8RPCU

  • How to test authenticated APIs?
  • How to prevent spinning up multiple services during provider verification?
  • What is the API Expand-Contract technique?
  • How do you validate that your Pact tests are working?

EU/UK​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNozekxXf5g

  • How do you trigger the provider verification flow?
  • How do you manage pacts for different environments?
  • When do Pact tests run in CI?
  • Which environments do you use pact testing for? e.g. dev, staging, production?
  • How do you promote (deploy) an application to an environment?

North America​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWDxWXH595s

  • Who authors Pact tests?
  • Can you do GraphQL testing with Pact?
  • Why should consumer contract tests reside in the same repository as the service?
  • What tools would you recommend to expose the stubs/dependencies of the providers?
  • How to test websocket messages with Pact?
  • Do I need to know what specification version I'm using?

April 2021​

UK/EU​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxrFj7xvQ24

  • How to test asynchronous services such as Lambda with SNS or Kafka
  • What is the boundary of a contract test?
  • Can I generate a contract test from OAS?
  • Where and when do tests run? (unit, CI, against production or dev?)

North America​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6BXvwCoKSQ

  • What is the difference between contract testing and functional testing and can you do negative testing?
  • How can I test optional fields?
  • How can I do contract testing with API clients/SDKS?

APAC​

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jARC5TRcn0c

  • What are the best practices for mocking provider dependencies?
  • Can I test 3rd party APIs?
  • What's the difference between Spring Cloud Contract and Pact?