Connecting two applications can look like a narrow technical task: send a value and receive a response. In practice, the harder decision is often what the value means, which system owns it and how work continues when the systems disagree.
01 / Choose the source of truth
For each important piece of information, identify where it starts and who may change it. If a customer, price or order status exists in more than one system, there must be a rule for conflicts. Without that decision, synchronization can spread an error faster.
02 / Agree on field meanings
Two fields with the same name do not necessarily mean the same thing. Status, date, amount and identifier may follow different rules. A field map should describe not only format, but meaning and examples of valid values.
03 / Design for failures
A request may be rejected, delayed or repeated. The project needs to say which operations may be retried, how duplicates are recognized and when a person must intervene. Useful messages and logs make it possible to understand what happened without guessing.
04 / Give people visibility
An integration should not be a black box for the team running the service. Show the state of operations, distinguish temporary failures from items that need correction and define who receives an alert. Responsible people need a way to recover paused work.
05 / Release and verify in stages
Before automating everything, try representative cases, check data in both systems and observe exceptions. A gradual rollout can reveal differences in the real process that a technical specification did not make visible.
TAKE INTO YOUR PROJECT
Three questions to answer.
- Which system is authoritative for each piece of information?
- What happens if a sync fails or runs twice?
- Who can see and resolve exceptions?
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