Many modern architectural styles, such as microservices and event-driven architectures - promote loosely coupled components connected by event-streams or API calls. Often these components are independently deployable and maintained by different teams.

Testing such systems can pose a challenge. We can unit test each individual components, but what can we do to ensure we have confidence in the overall system? How can we know at build-time that our individual service is not going to introduce a problem? How can we guard our service against breaking API changes from other teams?

End-to-end system tests are one solution, but they are often brittle, complicated and expensive to maintain.

This talk covers approaches for testing service-based architectures, with a focus on microservices, and introduces Consumer Driven Contract testing as an alternative to end-to-end cross-service tests.