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lifecycle-essentials.md

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Lifecycle Essentials

There are only minor differences in efficiency and velocity between a design-led, code- led, proxy-first, or prototype-led approach. The major gain in efficiency and velocity comes when all APIs possess contracts and up-to-date documentation, are fully tested, and are governable. Then you can bring them l into a common, well-known API life cycle, no matter how teams have begun their journey.

Elements

  • Lifecycle - A common, agreed upon API life cycle emerges across teams. They understand the various ways for entering it, and can discuss processes for every stage of the life cycle.
  • Contracts - You must have up-to-date and accurate machine-readable contracts available for all APIs, no matter how the API lifecycle is entered, to ensure that business value can be validated.
  • Discoverable - Every API is discoverable, including its metadata, the contracts defining what is possible, and the operations surrounding the API in production.
  • Productivity - Teams can move forward at their desired velocity. The company, while not compromising quality, keeps teams as productive as possible.
  • Quality - Contract and performance tests cover as close to 100% of the surface area of APIs as possible, ensuring a baseline of quality moving forward.
  • Observable - Every API and the life cycle around it is observable, providing you awareness and control over all aspects of the life cycle, and the way APIs are used.
  • Governance - APIs are discoverable, reliable, consistent, and delivered in a standardized format, no matter which team is developing them. That helps govern the forward motion of the enterprise.
  • Velocity - Achieving organizational, domain, and team velocity moves the enterprise forward. Finding just the right speed for the moment is the key to taking your business where it needs to go in the coming years.

The goal of the API life cycle isn’t to restrict teams to one way of delivering APIs, but rather to establish a common vocabulary, allowing everyone to get on the same page and determine together what is important across the API life cycle. Declaring what must always come first or saying there is a single way to deliver APIs is counterproductive and will undoubtedly slow down your API-first transformation. Ultimately, the approach isn’t the destination.Our goal is to efficiently and effectively deliver high- quality APIs that are discoverable, and have an up-to-date API contract that can be used across a well-known API life cycle. What matters most when trying to shift your API-first transformation towards a design- led approach is meeting your teams where they are. This is the only way you will be able to truly understand the state of teams’ work and determine how far you need to go to become API design-led.