newbie question: any QA / test enginner using pact. just wondering if this is tool for developer unit test or can be an good api test tool for QA as well.

Many thousands of QA / test engineers are using Pact, I was one of them before I joined Pactflow. Pact on the consumer side is traditionally used in component integration tests, alongside a assertion library such as Jest, mocha, chai in JavaScript and others in different languages. It is used for testing HTTP and message based clients, however you would use your code under test to issue your calls to your provider, rather than use Pact directly to issue your api request. You can use generate Pact contract files from the consumer side with Pact directly in various languages, or with one of our tool adapters. Is there some particular scenarios and approaches you are considering? What tools do you currently use?