Breaking Free from End-to-End Testing: Why Contract Testing is the Key to Microservices Success

Teams are increasingly moving towards microservices architecture, desiring short lead times with fast and independent deployments of their components. Still, they often struggle to see those desired benefits because they continue to rely too much on traditional end-to-end testing strategy. While end-to-end testing gives you maximum level of confidence, it can hamper your deployment frequency and lead time significantly, create coupling between teams, and make teams less autonomous. This is exactly the problem we went through at Discover Financial Services when we started modernizing our systems to microservices architecture. In this talk, I will share our experiences including the challenges we faced, our end-to-end testing obsession, how contract testing came to the rescue, various contract testing strategies and tools, the journey we went through in embracing contract testing, and how it helped remove bottlenecks in our CI/CD pipeline.