1. Name the business outcome
Write one sentence describing the trigger, the participant who needs an outcome and the maximum useful delay. “Integrate CRM and ERP” is not enough. “Create an approved customer in ERP within five minutes of sales approval and return the ERP identifier” is testable.
2. Map authority and meaning
Identify systems of record, identifiers, states, units, codes and sensitive fields. Record where data meanings differ. Most expensive integration errors are semantic, not syntactic.
3. Choose an interaction style
Use a synchronous call when the caller truly needs an immediate answer. Use messaging or events when work should survive temporary outages or consumers should be independent. Use batch or files when a clear window and reconciliation matter more than immediate delivery.
4. Define the contract
Specify data, validation, errors, versions, security, timeouts, retries, ordering, duplicates and recovery. A contract includes behaviour, not merely a payload schema.
5. Design for operations
Carry correlation identifiers, set service indicators, assign an owner, create a dead-letter or quarantine process and define how business records are reconciled.
6. Prove the difficult assumptions
Test peak volume, dependency failure, expired credentials, malformed data, replay and schema change. A successful happy-path demonstration is not enough evidence for production.
Build a reusable readiness brief
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