Example of how overlooking the underlying problem can lead to wasted effort.

Recently, I was involved in an initiative to adopt contract tests, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: We're talking about adopting contract tests. What's the underlying need we're trying to solve?

X: To prevent integration errors after release, and reduce the number of incidents we see afterward.

Me: That sounds great. ...at the same time, I wonder, it seems we don't currently have a clear overview of all incidents happening in the team. Is that right?

X: Yep, we still need to work on that.

Me: Hmm. I'm curious, what did the last few incidents actually look like? What caused them?

Y: We had a severe one caused by a misconfiguration. And another big one was also caused by a misconfiguration.

Z: And there was another major one, that missing regression unit test, you remember?

Me: Yeah.. So it sounds like the major incidents we remember weren't caused by service integration issues, but by misconfigurations and missing tests. Would that be right?

X: Yep.

Me: So it seems that if the goal is to lower the number of incidents, adopting contract tests might not actually help at this point.

X: That seems to be the case, yes.

Rather than diving straight into contract tests, the team would probably be better off starting with tracking incidents and understanding their causes. And maybe focusing on misconfiguration issues instead.