Modeling Our Onboarding API Cycle

The process of modeling an API involves collecting all the information we need in order to properly describe the tasks we want to accomplish, the data needed to get that work done, and the process or workflow needed to support all the tasks. For the most part, this is common-sense data collection and description, but it’s important to put together a kind of method or repeatable set of steps that we can use each time we want to model a new API.

It’s likely that we’ll be asked to help a team turn a manual process into an automated one using an API. Sometimes APIs or applications already exist. They do one or more parts of the expected work, but don’t work well together. Sometimes just a few parts are missing. Quite often, a company has a fully functioning API, but the workflow or data requirements have changed, and it’s our job to go in and help update an existing API to meet the company’s new needs.