April 08, 2024
Why Integration Maintenance Is Draining Engineers Productivity
Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Gil is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge , a leading unified API platform. Previously, Gil was the Head of Engineering at Untapped. As companies build customer-facing integrations, they'll find that each will, inevitably, break at unpredictable points in time. Many engineering teams fall into the trap of thinking they should be responsible for identifying these issues as they come up—in addition to troubleshooting and implementing their fixes. After all, this work requires a technical background. However, the reality is that maintaining integrations can be an extremely poor use of engineering resources for a number of reasons. Here are just a few of the top reasons—along with a solution that lets engineers avoid this work altogether. Forces Engineers To Constantly Context Switch Since product integrations can break frequently and for a wide range of reasons, clients will routinely ask the company that provides them (more specifically, the engineers at these companies) to fix whatever issues arise as soon as possible. Engineers, as a result, serve as a continual support resource for clients. Any time an issue crops up, the engineers will have to drop whatever they're working on and, in an attempt to placate clients, troubleshoot and resolve the integration issue as quickly as they can. Google’s Surprise Update Just Made Android More Like iPhone WWE WrestleMania 40 Results Winners And Grades From Night 2 Cena Undertaker And Everything That Happened After Cody Beat Roman At WrestleMania 40 The unpredictable nature of this work is not only stressful, but it also prevents the engineers from engaging in deep work for any sustained period of time. Moreover, as engineers context switch enough times to fix broken integrations, they'll start to think and even worry about integration-related work while on other projects—hurting their productivity even further. Lowers Engineers' Morale Integration maintenance is often thankless work—and when things go wrong, engineers often bear the brunt of clients' and employees' complaints. In addition, the work itself, while technically complex, isn't inherently interesting and exciting. Engineers aren't building cutting-edge features or improving the product's core functionality. They're simply addressing something that likely wasn't their fault to begin with—whether that's an API provider making a backward incompatible change to one of their endpoints, deprecating a specific endpoint without warning and so on. As engineers suffer through enough customer complaints and burn the midnight Oil to limit the impact integration issues have on clients, they'll eventually grow frustrated and unhappy. I've seen firsthand how this can not only lead their productivity to decline but also motivate them to look for other roles where integration maintenance isn't a core responsibility. Deprioritizes Projects That Engineers Are Best-Suited To Perform A company's engineers understand the ins and outs of their core product's code base, how different features impact clients, and how these features support the company's short and long-term goals. This makes them uniquely qualified to work on their company's core product. Unfortunately, integration maintenance gets in the way. Engineers will be forced to push key initiatives in their product roadmap back or even forgo them altogether, leading their employer's competitive edge to gradually slip away. On the other hand, engineers likely aren't experts on a specific integration. Once any breaks, they'll likely need to comb through the API provider's documentation to understand the issue and how they can troubleshoot it—and this is the best-case scenario. More often than not, the engineers will end up browsing forums or asking peers for a solution and applying brute force to fix an issue—which may cause even more issues. How To Minimize The Productivity Drain Of Maintaining Integrations Integrations will need to be maintained throughout their lifespan, so it's worth investing in measures that limit the amount of time engineers spend on maintenance-related work while also enabling them to fix any issue quickly. To that end, organizations can: • Build integrations with a common data schema. This allows engineers to better understand how a particular integration works even if they've never seen it before—which, in turn, enables them to resolve the associated integration issues faster. Moreover, since engineers are adding integrations to the normalized schema, it increases their chances of adding integrations successfully. As a result, these integrations are less likely to lead to errors that require engineering support over time. • Adopt integration observability tooling. Engineers can use a monitoring tool to generate API logs and automatically identify a wide range of integration issues based on predefined conditions. Engineers can even take it a step further by configuring the monitoring tool's alerts so they provide additional context (e.g., how a metric compares to the historical average). This can help them prioritize issues and identify the best path for resolving each more easily. Integration maintenance is a necessary evil for providing customer-facing integrations. While it'll always be painful to perform internally, organizations can make the work more manageable by building integrations through a normalized schema and using observability tooling effectively. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions
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