Exactly! And to the gp comment, how do you quantify "good api" until someone has used it? And even when someone ends up using it, how will they tell you if th

Exactly! And to the gp comment, how do you quantify "good api" until someone has used it? And even when someone ends up using it, how will they tell you if they find it easy or hard to use? Also, once it starts getting heavily used, won't that make it much riskier and harder to sell to management to refactor it if you get feedback that it is hard to use? Unit, integration, and functional tests all help here, but let's say your abstraction has adoption at 100 api consumer call sites. There's a lot that could go wrong. Now, if you are the only person using the api for a long time, that's another way to determine if it's a "good api", because you'll use it to build things. Refactoring it is still a tough sell to management in that case though. Not impossible, but tough.