Understanding Contract-Driven Development Approach

Naresh Jain discusses contract-driven development, which involves creating a contract or API specification between the provider and consumer of a service. This approach ensures collaboration, streamlines communication, and avoids late surprises due to contract mismatches.

Naresh is an internationally recognized Technology & Product Development Expert, currently driving transformative initiatives at Jio. With a career spanning over 20 years, Naresh has significantly influenced product engineering cultures at various unicorns and Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Amazon, and JP Morgan. He is the founder of Xnsio, a consulting business, and has developed tools like ConfEngine and Specmatic. A pioneer of the Agile movement in India, Naresh has organized over 100 international conferences and started multiple user groups. His contributions to the Agile community earned him the Gordon Pask Award in 2007.

Takeaways

Contract-driven development involves creating a contract or API specification between the provider and consumer of a service.
It streamlines communication, avoids late surprises, and ensures collaboration between multiple systems.
This approach is suitable for projects with distributed systems, modernizing legacy applications, and building new projects.
It can be applied to greenfield projects, brownfield projects, and legacy revival projects.
It helps decouple releases and components, leading to shorter release cycles and better collaboration.
Contract-driven development improves product stability and resilience through early feedback and more resilient APIs.
The adoption of contract-driven development has visible and hidden costs, including the learning curve and the need to shift how people design and develop.