API integrations are at the core of everything we do online. They enable integrations between different services, and they power the servers that bring our applications to life. The pervasiveness of APIs has led to the emergence of the so-called API economy, and most digital products are nowadays built around APIs, both for internal and for public consumption.
The sustainability of our APIs relies on our ability to deliver successful API integrations. However, more often than not, API integrations tend to fail. This is due to a variety of factors, such as lack of API documentation or bad API documentation, lack of API design, and the use of ineffective workflows for API development.
Lack of documentation, or bad documentation, prevents API client developers from building effective integrations with the backend, while lack of design makes APIs difficult to understand and therefore difficult to integrate with.
In this presentation, I want to present API development workflows that I’ve successfully used with my clients over the past years to deliver successful API integrations. I’ll present strategies for consolidating the API documentation, and I’ll show how we use documentation-driven development to leverage API documentation and deliver successful API integrations. Through this approach, we can use mock servers and robust API testing frameworks for testing and validating our implementations.