Support for pending pacts in Bidirectional contract tests

[roshanmathewjohn]

Reference: https://docs.pact.io/pact_broker/advanced_topics/pending_pacts

"Pending pacts" is a feature for providers, to avoid new consumer expectations breaking the tests and blocking their pipeline.

In Bidirectional contract testing world, how do we set a newly published OAS as pending to prevent consumer tests from failing?

[mefellows]

Thanks for raising @roshanmathewjohn!

Pending Pacts is not something currently supported for our BDCT flow. Pending Pacts works on the provider verification step in Pact - something that is not analogous in BDCT. It is expected that teams use the can-i-deploy feature alongside environments and branches to determine if a change is safe. In this case, a consumer would not be able to add a feature (expectation) the provider doesn’t provide and then also deploy it to an environment that would cause a breaking change for the provider.

It may make sense to support this in a can-i-merge scenario, so will leave this open for further discussion.