Contract-Driven Development: The Future of API

As our clients scale their API ecosystems, ensuring consistency, reliability, and backward compatibility becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional API testing often falls short in preventing integration failures and enforcing expected behaviors across services. Contract-Driven Development (CDD) offers a solution by shifting quality left - using OpenAPI Schema definitions to establish a clear contract between providers and consumers before or in parallel with development.

In this session, we'll examine how our team deployed contract-first API development enhancing our client's software quality by automating validation, enforcing schema compliance, and integrating contract testing into CI/CD pipelines. We'll dive into real-world implementation strategies using OpenAPI, Portman, and Postman, demonstrating how automated contract testing reduces defects, accelerates development, and improves collaboration between developers and QA teams and challenges we faced.

Join this session to learn how CDD can revolutionize your API testing strategy, reduce integration failures, and ensure seamless collaboration between teams.

Paper | Presentation

Richard Martin

Rick Martin is a seasoned Software Engineering Leader with over 40 years of experience specializing in automated test engineering, software development lifecycle improvements, and quality strategy. He has deep expertise in Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Contract Driven Development (CDD), and CI/CD automation, working extensively with Cypress, Postman, Jest, and OpenAPI for API test automation.

Currently, Rick is engaged in a consulting role focused on contract-driven development and API test automation using OpenAPI Schema definitions, Portman, and Postman, leveraging GitLab CI/CD and Azure Data Factory for ETL processes.

In his free time, Rick is developing a Node.js and React application leveraging MariaDB and RBAC authentication via Google Identity.