Require that breaking changes to a production API are identified, avoided where possible, and never shipped silently onto an existing version. I hold this line hard because a breaking change you did not announce is a betrayal of every consumer who trusted your contract, and trust is the whole point of doing APIs. When a breaking change is truly necessary, it should be delivered through a new version with a clear migration path and a deprecation window, not by mutating the endpoint people already depend on. Detecting these against the API contract in your pipeline is how you keep good intentions from turning into a 3 a.m. outage for somebody else.
Breaking Changes (Lifecycle)
Strategies
API Dependencies Are Tracked and Managed
All API-to-API dependencies must be documented and tracked, with upstream and downstream impact analysis performed before changes are made, ensuring that teams understand the ripple effects of chan...
API Versioning Follows a Defined Standard
All APIs must follow a defined versioning strategy, whether semantic versioning or date-based versioning, with clear policies for how versions are communicated, how consumers are migrated, and how ...
APIs Are Gracefully Deprecated and Retired
All APIs must follow a formal deprecation and retirement process that provides consumers with adequate notice, migration support, and a clear timeline from deprecation to removal, ensuring that no ...
APIs Earn and Maintain Consumer Trust
All APIs must demonstrate trustworthiness through transparent service level commitments, consistent deprecation policies, reliable performance, proper security, and clear legal terms, building the ...
Breaking Changes Are Prevented or Carefully Managed
All changes to APIs must be evaluated for breaking impact before release, with breaking changes requiring explicit approval, version increments, migration guides, and proactive consumer communicati...
Experiences
Stability
Stability is the experience of being able to depend on an API not breaking underneath you. It is built on thoughtful versioning, backward compatibility, clear change communication, and honoring com...
Trust
Establish trust with API consumers will evolve and build over time, and is something that can be lost in a very short period of time. Trust will depend on other experiences like quality and reliabi...
Change
Managing and effectively communicating changes across one or more APIs is a leading cause of instability and friction in enterprise operations. While these changes often surface in applications use...
Lifecycle
tag Versioning Define
APIs change, and how you version is how you keep faith with the people who depend on you. I decide my versioning and compatibility strategy at the beginning, not after I have already broken someone...
