In this article I’m discussing the best practices you can follow when it comes to integrating with a 3rd party service for data syncing between your system and the 3rd party system. The best practices are based of the experience I had at my current work place.
Define key objectives of the integration clearly
Read documentation for the service and understand it’s capabilities
Test and evaluate integration service points at the earliest
- So that you can validate actual behavior of the service and uncover potential pitfalls when integrating with your system
- there are open source software that you can use this for various integration mechanism. For example Postman to test REST API endpoints over HTTP.
Have a clear line of contact people and communication protocol
- It is important to have someone from the 3rd party service who you can talk to clarify any doubts or problems
- This is especially important when the 3rd party service documentation is poor