Scope By Business Event
Start every integration with a single business event: new customer booked, renewal closed, invoice issued. Define the source of truth and the downstream systems that truly need the data. This keeps the work scoped and measurable.
Write the handshake as a contract your stakeholders can review—payload shape, timing expectations, escalation path. When everyone signs off on the contract, you cut rework by half.
- Document source/target owners and escalation paths.
- Write consumer-friendly schemas with examples.
- Track each event as a ticket with acceptance tests.
Stand Up A Lightweight Control Plane
You do not need a massive ESB. A small control plane—queue, function apps, or serverless workers—keeps transformations, retries, and monitoring centralized while your transactional systems stay untouched.
Instrument everything: latency, retry counts, and payload diffs. A single dashboard builds trust so ops teams know integrations are healthy.
Automate The Edge Cases Later
Keep the first release focused on the happy path. Catalogue the hairy exceptions, but do not automate them yet. Once your core flow is stable, you can automate the rare cases with confidence.
- Ship version one with clear escalation paths.
- Monitor retry and failure queues daily.
- Automate exceptions only after the base flow is stable.