Let's Make a Pact - Don't Break my API - Frank Kilcommins, SmartBear

Let's Make a Pact - Don't Break my API - Frank Kilcommins, SmartBear

60+% of organizations cite microservices as a leading driver for API growth in the next 2 years. Teams continue to break down monolithic systems, seeking to capitalize on the advantages of decoupled capabilities - reduced costs, reduced TTM, faster releases, decentralized evolvability. Such benefits don't linearly scale! Managing the API sprawl is out weighting the benefits for many!

Even with the solid extensibility design, governance workflows and high levels of automation, all of which leveraging OpenAPI and other leading specifications, it can be difficult to know what constitutes a breaking change to an API.

What's the impact?
Teams providing APIs lose sight of who their consumers are. Consumers lose track of what surface area of APIs they are using. In fact, any observable change in the behavior of an API will be deemed breaking by certain consumers (Hyrum’s Law).