Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Contract testing
Automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers, which catches a breaking change at the boundary before integration does. It is the technical half of ownership and contract at the boundary.
Where the standard develops it
- DE-4Managing scope, risk, and dependencies across workstreamsSeeing the whole, naming the risk, negotiating the boundary.
- TJ-3Code review and quality standardsIncluding standards for AI-generated code.
Related terms
- Interface discipline
- Versioning, a deprecation policy, contract tests and communicated change for a widely used interface.
- AI governance
- The explicit, proportionate policy for AI-assisted work.
- Aligned autonomy
- Direction, priorities and boundary standards set centrally, with methods left to teams.
- Bus factor
- The number of people who could leave before critical knowledge or capability is lost.
- Ground truth
- The real state of a piece of work, established by looking rather than by reading a status report.
- Innovation budget
- An explicit, bounded allocation for evaluating new technology, with pilots that have criteria, a contained blast radius and an honest review.
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- Paved road
- A well-supported default platform and toolchain that makes the good path the easy one.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Contract testing. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.contract-testing). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/contract-testing