On March 10, 2026, we began discussions regarding the integration between our application and the third-party vendor’s system. At the conclusion of that meeting, it was agreed that the vendor would develop a set of APIs for our use. No technical requirements, specifications, or implementation details were discussed at that time, as we assumed there would be follow-up meetings to define the scope and requirements.
Over the following two months, we sent several emails requesting status updates and meetings to discuss the integration. To our surprise, on May 29, we received an update stating that the team was “actively working through the API development” and expected the APIs to be ready for review the following week. This raised an obvious question: how had the project progressed to the development phase without completing the earlier stages of the software development life cycle, such as requirements gathering, analysis, and design?
On July 8, we were informed that the API integration was undergoing a “refinement process.”
On July 20, we received notification that the integration had entered “peer review” and was scheduled for release the following Wednesday evening.
On July 29, we finally received a sample POST request body and a test endpoint. After testing, we immediately reported issues with the POST functionality.
On August 20, we were asked when we would like to move the integration into production. At that point, the POST issues remained unresolved, and the GET and PUT endpoints had not yet been implemented. Our response was straightforward: we were still waiting on the vendor to deliver a functional and complete API.
On September 3, we were notified that the APIs were ready for testing and received the accompanying documentation. Over the next two days, we thoroughly tested the APIs and reported numerous issues. The vendor subsequently acknowledged that the API behavior was “contradicting the documentation.”
Frankly, that outcome was not surprising. Without proper requirements gathering, collaborative design discussions, and validation throughout the development process, the result was predictable: an API that failed to align with its own documentation and was not ready for production use.
