A Practical Checklist Before You Integrate Two Business Systems
Most integration failures are predictable. A short checklist before you start avoids most of them.
Engineering Notes · 6 min read
Before writing integration code, map exactly which fields matter on both sides, including which system is the source of truth when the same data exists in both. Ambiguity here is the most common cause of integration bugs.
Decide how failures are handled before they happen: does a failed sync retry automatically, alert a human, or silently skip? An integration with no visible failure state will eventually fail silently and erode trust in the data.
Plan for partial failure. Real-world integrations rarely fail cleanly — a batch of 500 records might have three that fail validation. Decide whether the whole batch stops or the valid records proceed while failures are flagged.
Finally, log enough detail to debug a failure without re-running the integration against production data, and monitor the integration itself, not just the systems it connects.
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