Contract-First Development
Make it clear for everyone
Deven Phillips
Jim Barton
What Is Contract-First Development?
Contract-First Development is about making your intent clear across team members and external teams. By using a tool like OpenAPI, we can define our programming API clearly at the outset. We also update the "contract" before we implement changes to the code. Further benefits include:
- Code generation for both clients and servers
- Automated testing and validation tools\n- Simple mocking of the service under development
- More relevant and current documentation\n\nMore tooling around OpenAPI can be found HERE
Why Do Contract-First Development?
So that everyone can be productive in parallel AND we can have strong guarantees of the resulting applications working together properly. Instead of UI development being blocked awaiting a working service to code against, UI and Service developers can work in parallel. Also, if you define the contract first when developing or changing API interfaces, you have a clearer "Definition Of Done" and "Acceptance Criteria" for the work.
How to do Contract-First Development?
Look at Contract-First Development
Links we love
Check out these great links which can help you dive a little deeper into running the Contract-First Development practice with your team, customers or stakeholders.