What makes crm api integration dependable?
Dependability comes from explicit record authority, safe delivery semantics, bounded recovery, and reconciliation—not from the number of endpoints. For customer identity, consent, lifecycle events, and segmentation data, the design must explain what happens after duplicates, delay, partial failure, and an ambiguous timeout. Customer synchronization must preserve identity and consent.
Should this use a request, webhook, queue, or batch?
Use a request when the caller needs an immediate decision, a webhook when a source announces change, a queue when work needs isolation and retry, and a batch or reconciliation job when completeness matters more than immediacy. Many durable integrations use more than one pattern.
What should be tested beyond the happy path?
Test invalid and missing data, stale versions, duplicate events, reordering, throttling, permission changes, timeout after remote commit, and replay. The route risk—merging identities without consent or conflict rules—needs a concrete test rather than a sentence in a brief. Aggressive identity merging can combine different people or revive data that should be deleted.
What evidence belongs at handoff?
Provide payload examples, mapping rules, state diagrams, failure categories, dashboards, alert ownership, replay instructions, and a reconciliation report. Test conflicts, opt-out propagation, deletion, duplicate identity, and delayed lifecycle events.