Peter Thomas (creator of Karate open-source) was part of the API platform leadership at Intuit where his team was responsible for a set of 15 services. It was early December 2016, and Peter was in the process of troubleshooting one of the automated tests that his team was working on, and he was trying to solve an issue which had been slowing down the team – which was that a particular test for the core accounting services system was unstable. The test would randomly fail, and this was blocking a production release - because it was not clear if there was a problem with the test or if there was a genuine defect. The test that Peter was looking at was implemented in the Java programming language and it also depended on a framework created in-house, which had evolved over a period of 3 to 4 years.