Project Retrospectives · Published June 3, 2026
Retrospective: A Third Party Changed a Field Silently
A partner upgraded their API, the response shape shifted quietly, and our system broke two weeks later.
Our system depends on a logistics provider's tracking API. One day some orders stopped updating. The provider had changed a field from a string to an object without updating the documentation.
Why it took two weeks
The exception was swallowed: parse failures were caught, logged once and never alerted.
No contract tests. We validated the integration once at build time and never again.
The feedback path was long: the client told support, support told engineering, days had passed.
Improvements
A daily contract check now validates third-party responses and alerts on structural change.
Parse failures report to monitoring instead of disappearing.
Key providers are contractually required to announce version changes in advance.
Depend on a third party and change is certain. All you can do is find it early instead of assuming stability.
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