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Productivity

How do you achieve productivity in an API-first world? Through well-defined workspaces that possess everything you need to engage with an API throughout its well-defined life cycle. An API-first approach organizes the enterprise API factory floor into workspace beehives that contain the artifacts, documentation, mock servers, environments, monitors, and other building blocks teams will need to move the enterprise forward.

Elements

  • Collections - The collection is a machine-readable, executable, and documented unit of work, providing everything you need to define a unit of business value in an API-first world. That includes definitions, documentation, mock servers, testing, and the automation you need to validate, scale, and empower your teams to do more with less.

  • Lifecycle - You must have a known life cycle that allows all contributors to deliver the best possible APIs in a short amount of time. That means standardizing how APIs are delivered to optimize productivity, and making sure developers have the education and training they need for navigating the life cycle, as well as getting teams on the same page across enterprise domains.

  • Documentation - Everything across the life cycle must be documented. That includes not just the reference documentation for your APIs, but onboarding docs, workflow docs, and your mocks, tests, and other automation. Documentation turns workspaces into institutional memory across the enterprise.

  • Discovery - All API operations must be discoverable, making teams, APIs, and operations available via search and discovery and ready for use across any stage of the API life cycle. Allow teams to find what they need when they need it, helping make API operations not only more discoverable but also capable of self-service, increasing team productivity.

  • Workspaces - Everything you need to engage with APIs should be available via collaborative workspaces. The workspaces must contain e access controls to prevent undesired outcomes while ensuring that your APIs are discoverable, and so is everything else needed to sustain and evolve APIs, allowing for turnover of teams without any disruption to work.

Teams aren’t productive in a chaotic environment where they can’t find what they need, there is no common vocabulary for how things work, and they constantly lack documentation. Workspaces help ground the life cycle, and collections provide the atomic units of enterprise memory over time, helping teams move forward as they iterate products and increase the value your organization produces. Why do API operations tend to be so chaotic? It’s mainly because APIs and the operations surrounding them are often very abstract and technical. The more we can do to make API operations visible, discoverable, and well documented thin workspaces, the less chaotic things will be. EXPERT PERSPECTIVE Boy Scouts of America does more with less by being API-first When I saw the brainstorming session for a proposed episode of Breaking Changes with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), I expected a simple story about how APIs power mobile applications at the non-profit organization. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the BSA is actually API-first in everything they do. They depend on their ongoing API-first transformation to do more with fewer resources, while providing the best possible experience for membership and partners. Vijay Challa, former CIO of the BSA, explained the importance of domain-driven design principles, which the organization applies to all of its API resources. Domain-driven design means they’ve put a lot of thought and planning into their schema and vocabulary for things like scouts, events, badging, and the other moving parts of what we all know as the Boy Scouts. Vijay’s team understood that doing the upfront work around the design of domains would pay off during the design phase and other stages of their API life cycle, saving them time and money down the road. The BSA employs an API contract-driven approach to defining, designing, and then delivering their APIs. They recognize the efficiencies they gain using a contract-driven approach, and how it helps with documentation, mocking, testing, security, and other stages of the API life cycle. API contracts allow

the BSA to deliver more reliable and secure APIs across their internal and external applications. Their thorough understanding of APIs and the importance of a contract-driven approach has helped them with their ongoing API-first transformation, maintaining momentum with smaller teams and fewer