Consumer-Driven Contracts

Kind: constraint

Layer: Contracts Core

Record: architecture:consumer-driven-contracts

Severity: recommended

Scope: API, service, integration

Canonical: Ontology

A rule or precondition that a provider verifies each change against the expectations its consumers have recorded.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Uniform Interface and before Control Plane.

Requires

• Explicit Contracts

Reinforces

• Backward Compatibility
• Contract-First Design

Enables

• Provider Change Safety
• Consumer-Verified Compatibility

Conflicts with

• Unversioned Breaking Change

In tension with

• Provider Autonomy

Tensions

• Consumer-Driven Contracts / Provider Autonomy

Violated by

• Silent Breaking Changes

Refactored by

• Consumer-Driven Contract Tests

Severity

• recommended

Category

• Contracts / Interfaces / Compatibility

Linked from

• Anti-patterns
• Contracts / Interfaces / Compatibility
• Contracts / Interfaces / Compatibility
• Severity levels
• The resolutions