API integration services to get systems and apps to work together

The 3rd party API integration is the integration of APIs developed by a 3rd party (Facebook, Twitter) in one's custom software to gain partial access to services, features or functionalities for better business process.

A 3rd party API is an API developed by a 3rd party. By integrating these APIs, 1st parties can gain partial access to the features and functionalities of 3rd party services. Next time when you book an Uber, take a close look at the Maps. These maps are available due to the 3rd party integration of Google Maps API with Uber.

There are 7 types of APIs, however, the most commonly used are web services APIs. These are a piece of a software or system available that provides access to its services through a dedicated URL over the internet. These types of APIs pass the information in a way which is easy for other software to understand or parse. For examples, Flicker API http://www.flickr.com/services/api/.

Web service APIs uses HTTP or HTTPS for information exchange. Whenever the client software wants to communicate, it sends an HTTP request which is returned with a HTTP response from the API. During these requests, the information is passed in the URL itself. The common types of web services API are

- SOAP
- XML-RPC
- REST
- JSON-RPC

However, the widely used web service API is REST. REST APIs are known for providing faster communication due to less usage of internet bandwidth. Apart from that, these provide easy-to-parse URL structure, which consists of nouns primarily that reflects the logical, hierarchical categories of the data on offer.

Here’s our solution for avoiding technical debt. A single person needs to own the architecture of what you’re trying to build, and must have put substantial thought into it before one line of code is even written, and everyone must be aware of that plan.

If you just start building a thing without having someone in charge of architecture, you’re going to encounter worse than average technical debt. And it will only get more extreme as you keep building new features right on top of those old bugs that never got fixed, and probably never will.

Requirements are constantly changing and at some point, it may become obvious that parts of the code are obsolete, have become cumbersome, and must be redesigned to meet new requirements.

We document what is tech debt and why it exists as we build features. Make it clear while the features are built that the speed of development is not sustainable and use your documentation as support.

When we do incur debt, we try to document inline: why and what. And add a todo how to fix. We also discuss each debt as a team so everyone understands.

Usually, we let it sit for one or two dev cycles and allocate one or two sprints on only fixing the issues related to tech. Sometimes we find we didn’t need it in the first place and rip it out. Other times, we’d find we did need it so we try to clean up sooner rather than later. This is pretty common for major new features. Ship and MVP quick, then clean it up.

This is our more successful strategy. Obviously, we may have debt from long ago. We try to clean as we go with the general trend of reducing debt (even if we have short blips of increasing).

All of this doesn’t mean that we don’t focus on agile and delivering things quickly. Just that these are considerations and we make sure they don’t end up saving 1 hour today and costing 5 hours tomorrow.

Freelance marketplaces like Upwork, Toptal, Gigster, Freelancer, etc can help you get in touch with thousands of developers. They provide transparent access to devs but you have to vet candidates and take care of everything. These platforms do not provide a guarantee of delivery and results.

Tech agencies and software consultancies follow outdated engagement and execution models. The teams and devs hired through them don't integrate with your team well. Transparency and collaboration are lacking.

We started Simform with the goal of bringing assurance, certainty, and transparency in the software development services space. Most of our competitors provide TRANSACTIONAL services. You post a gig, they match you up with a developer and you take it from there. We aren't a transactional service.

Whether your project is at the early ideation stage or you have all features drawn out, our tech consultation team works with you to prepare a detailed tech solution and execution plan. We are huge believers in high output management and everything we suggest from tech architecture to talent skill set will focus on getting results and speeding up the time to market.

Our developers are creative technologists who also understand design. This unique combination of skills ensures that our designs will fit within the framework of your systems and give your customers a better experience.

Building software with great UX requires changing the Agile process to fit in UX designers needs.

Understand technical constraints first to save time
We try to understand the technical constraints and design with them in mind. Collaboration with development can help us identify the design that could be technically prohibitive. This allows us to adapt before we have invested time in refining or testing a design.

Research and test before, during, and after development.
As UX Designers, we are able to identify friction in a UI and resolve it before it even goes into development. Often with more complex interactions, it can be difficult to fully prototype these experiences. Being able to test throughout the process we are able to reduce our risk and increase our confidence in the design.

Have time to design for both microinteractions and the big picture.
When we do get in the trenches it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture but our approach makes sure overall user goals and ease of use are maintained.

Adapt quickly to new information.
Another great reason to integrate UX Design with the development process. When you aren’t working with development, no matter how hard you try, you’ll be slowed down reacting to new data and iterating on features.

Be quick.
Simply said, if we can reduce the time from concept to customer’s hands we win.

Kanban with a UX Column

In Kanban, cards flow from left to right across the board. There isn’t an encapsulated sprint (but that doesn’t mean you don’t have deadlines). So here a UX Designer can pull a card from the top of the backlog. They are able to plan their research, create prototypes, and design the feature. Once done, they mark that card as such. When a developer become available, they are able to pull cards marked as done in design.

Our design work won't have to sit for as long lost in the bottom of a backlog. We do create a little segregation, but less so than either of the other two. Since everyone is on the same board, everyone is on the same team. We are all trying to move cards from one side to another and appreciate the dependencies we have on each other.

Here’s how we will work with you -

1) Test Cases Driven User Stories for Clear Requirements -

When our engagement with the client starts we help them create detailed user stories and scope out the next few sprints.

2) Intense Sprint Planning

In order to execute projects on time, you need to plan sprints as much as possible.

3) Iterative Delivery

Typically, in an agile development process, we will divide the implementation process into several checkpoints rather than a single deadline. They are called iterations and are part of each sprint.

4) Documentation

We document everything from application and code level architecture decisions, to live user stories document, to design focused UX/UI/Design System documents.

5) Constant Communication and Retrospective

Stand-Up Each workday begins with a brief team stand-up meeting to discuss what we did yesterday, and what we plan to do today.

6) Code review

A successful peer review strategy for code review requires balance between strictly documented processes and a non-threatening, collaborative environment.

7) Integrating QA in the development process

We have gotten much better about integrating QA in our development process. We used to loop QA in after our code was pushed to the master branch, which was clunky.

Now our QA engineers will identify and create a test plan as soon as we begin working on the next sprint. As initial development nears completion, an engineer and a QA engineer will run through test scenarios together.8) CI CD and Automating Deployment

Easily release and deploy solutions by making the build process easier by building CI CD pipeline. The developer's changes are validated by creating a build and running automated tests against the build.

9) Post-release

It’s important to circle back and review how the process went once you’re done, be it a success or failure.

Did the testing correctly model the production scenario? Did the team correctly estimate the effort required to release a product? How is the product running in production?

Review how well the team performed by revisiting the implementation and testing checkpoints. Your team will adjust their performance accordingly as they grow used to being held accountable for every step in this process.

Managing a remote team is not easy. There are critical mistakes you can make when trying to leverage the vast amounts of remote talent.

We hear frequently from prospective clients that it takes forever to release new features, that users aren't adopting products, and that finished work hasn't met their expectations.

The solution: Communication, lots of it. Constant communication makes sure there can be absolutely no surprise breaks in execution.

Simform team integrates into your team, participating in standup and scrum meetings, weekly demos, weekly retrospectives.

Daily stand-ups
We do daily stand-ups where everyone gets on a video chat and tells you what they are working on that day and the previous day. When you’ve got people working for you in multiple time zones, this can be challenging. But it is crucial to the success of your team.

The Agile methodology calls for each contributor to go around, talk about what they’ve been working on, what they will be working on, estimate how long it’s going to take them, whether there are any critical blockers that could cause delay, and what their bandwidth looks like. These stand-ups are rigorously tracked by the Tech Lead.

But we do not just rely on unstructured communication. Everyone at Simform uses PPP (progress, plans, problems) methodology which is used at companies like Facebook, Google,Ebay, Skype etc. PPP is used to detail progress, issues, thoughts and anything else pertaining to their tasks.

Weekly demonstrations

This one is simple: get everybody on a video chat, share screens, have people show their work, and then talk about it.

If something is exceptional, call it out and appreciate the work. So team stays motivated.

If something is buggy or substandard, ask why and figure out solutions. This meeting is usually way longer than a stand-up as it is designed to literally “demo” the work that has been promised during stand-ups.

Keep in mind that if there are any “semi-off-topic” follow-up questions then they should be saved for the later Retrospective meeting.

Weekly Retrospectives
A weekly retrospective is where you all collectively review what went well and what could have been improved based on the demo.

We use the lean method of holding a meeting. It is great because it gives everyone a voice—there’s an element of democracy in the development process now. You’re still “the boss” but everybody now has some skin in the game. This will also help to organically create a culture within your remote team—something we will cover at length in a future post.

We start a project with a “Discovery Phase”. One of the outcomes of this phase is a list of features that the software will have. Those features then get broken into stories, and we write each story from the perspective of a Stakeholder of the system. User stories are easily digestible user behaviour flows detailing how user will achieve goals.

Then, for each story, we work with the clients to discover examples of how that specific stakeholder or end user uses the tool we’re building. Not only do we look for examples of success, but also examples of failure. And finally, we ask if there are examples of different ways to do the same thing. These scenarios are a list of actions that deliver value to this stakeholder.

Goal here is to build ubiquitous language and shared understanding between, developers, team members, stakeholders, and customers.

We use ATDD + BDD approach to create these user stories. This format has worked wonderfully for us as it helps Development Team (developers, QA, designers, TL) understand the acceptance criteria and goals of functionalities and features. Not to mention it generates lots of conversations between Tech team and stakeholders which helps increase shared understanding amongst everyone.

A point that is sometimes understated around this common language, is that the developers are learning not only the words used by the business but what they mean when they interact with each other in different contexts of the software. This is a hard piece of learning to come by without a structured way of using concrete examples to uncover details about the business.

To explain the point of SHARED UNDERSTANDING AND BDD, we have to start by accepting this simple premise: A large part of the challenges faced by software development projects are communication problems. Behaviour Driven Development is a way to:

- Structure communication to describe examples of how to use the software, these are called “scenarios”.

- Capture scenarios from the perspective of the stakeholders of the system

- Learn and Use the language and terminology of the business

- Gather just enough details of the system to be able to set a preliminary estimate

- Leverage the scenarios as executable tests that drive the design of the software

- Developers and clients work together to agree on what the system will do by building concrete examples.