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I just got bitten by a vendor that changed a business critical API twice in three weeks with neither versioning nor notification. It's very unprofessional. I s
by cimmanom 9y ago
I just got bitten by a vendor that changed a business critical API twice in three weeks with neither versioning nor notification. It's very unprofessional.
I strongly second the recommendation to version customer-facing APIs. You should never be releasing backwards-incompatible changes without giving customers the option to upgrade on their own timelines (within reason - its unreasonable to expect you to support an older API for a decade; 3 months is an absolute minimum, though, and I'd recommend more like 18-36 months for enterprise customers; and there can be exceptions for changes that address severe security or data loss defects.)
And yes, at the very least, email communication is appreciated. Even if you're versioning - if you have a customer using an outdated API, you should be warning them that it's deprecated and then again a couple times leading up to EOL.
- is_true 9y agoWTF? Is it something critical?
- cimmanom 8y agoA hosted build system. It didn't bring our customer-facing business to a halt or anything, but it did grind our QA and deployment process to a standstill at a particularly inconvenient time.
- bellt0wn98121 9y agoDo you pay this vendor? I'm trying to wrap my head around how a paid vendor is so careless.
- cimmanom 8y agoYup, we pay them. Support has since informed us that the announcement was in the monthly newsletters we don't read because they're usually all marketing materials.