Comparison
Contract testvsData contract
Contract test
the consumer's expectations are recorded and replayed against the provider's build, so nobody breaks the other by surprise.
A test asserting that a provider satisfies the specific expectations of its consumers, run in the provider's pipeline. It catches integration breakage without a full end-to-end environment, which is the trade that makes it worth the setup. It only covers the interactions consumers actually declared.
Full entry →Data contract
the source team's deploy pipeline fails if they remove a field your models depend on, because the expectation is written down and checked.
An explicit, enforced agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, freshness and how change is communicated. The word 'enforced' is the entire point: a document nobody's CI reads is a wish. It moves the cost of a breaking change from the consumer discovering it at 09:00 to the producer discovering it at commit time, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a busy product team.
Full entry →