breaking changes early. In reality, our first attempt at enforcing contract testing created more problems than it solved—failing builds, frustrated developers, and teams bypassing the system entirely.

In this talk, I’ll share a real-world journey of adopting Microcks for API mocking and contract testing, including the mistakes we made early on. I’ll walk through how strict contract enforcement backfired, why developers resisted stateful mocks, and where automated validation became noise instead of signal. More importantly, I’ll explain how we adjusted our workflow to make Microcks genuinely useful: introducing progressive enforcement, scoping contract checks to high-risk APIs, and using recorded interactions instead of hand-written mocks.

The session focuses on practical tradeoffs rather than ideal setups. I’ll show CI examples, policy changes, and team feedback that shaped the final approach. Attendees will leave with a realistic framework for deciding where contract testing adds value and where it simply slows teams down.