Chapter 4: Assuring the Quality of the API Service (or Product)

All software engineering teams strive to create a quality product as an output from the weeks of planning, designing, developing, and testing cycles. This, however, is not possible unless there is a clear and common understanding of the quality goals (or attributes) of the product under development.

A product backlog in the form of architecture backlog stories must be created and prioritized in a timely fashion to accomplish the targets/metrics set for these quality attributes. Otherwise, late discovery of critical issues, and subsequent fixing at a later stage in the project lifecycle, will turn out to be very costly.

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the important quality attributes that will apply to API-centric solutions. The objective is to assess the impact of non-functional requirements on the solution design and what trade-offs are necessary to achieve a highly reliable API platform.

By the...