A license-renewal producer plans to remove a field that independently deployed consumers still need. What test order protects those consumers?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Put the old handshake in a test that must stay green. If the producer breaks that handshake, the test fails before production does. Versioning is the escape hatch—not skipping the test.
Full Explanation
When a license-renewal producer plans to remove a field that independently deployed consumers still need, keep consumer expectations or schema checks that encode the old contract so a breaking producer change fails tests before it ships. If an incompatible change is truly required, version the API and migrate consumers deliberately—do not silently delete the field in production first. Contract-first failure is what protects independently deployed peers.
Removing the field in production first and updating tests after citizen outages appear fails by concept: tests should gate the break, not document the outage. Skipping contract tests entirely and relying on optional versioning notes in a wiki fails because unread notes do not fail CI. Shipping the break and requiring every consumer to hot-patch within the same minute fails operationally and conceptually—independent deployability assumes consumers are not on a synchronized emergency clock.
Exam caveat: breaking changes need versioning plus consumer migration; green consumer contracts are the safety net before remove. Operational check: remove the field on a producer branch and confirm the consumer contract suite fails; introduce a v2 contract, migrate a canary consumer, then retire v1 only after consumers stop depending on it.