Charge your APIs Volume 29: API enabling as a factor for success

An Enabling Team is one of the four team types of the Team Topologies framework, as introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. How can this pattern be successfully applied to the design and development of APIs to create interfaces that really contribute to the business strategy?

APIs are an important building block for digitalization and thus, the pressure on development teams to provide APIs is constantly growing. However, development teams often lack the necessary knowledge and experience, especially when they are mainly working in the ERP environment or in backend systems. Combined with pressing deadlines, this leads to APIs that are non-reusable, difficult to maintain, insecure and poorly documented. This frustrates and significantly slows down the development teams that rely on APIs and therefore has a negative impact on an organisation's ability to innovate. An API Enabling Team made up of experts can help teams to get started to ensure that high-quality APIs are created which contribute to the business strategy and promote the success of the organisation. This article highlights the challenges, foundations, prerequisites and opportunities of API enabling as an important success factor for establishing APIs as building blocks for digitalization.

Challenges

Why do many development teams struggle to build high-quality APIs? Development teams that mainly work with legacy systems or have very specialised skills lack the necessary knowledge. Many practices of modern software development have not yet reached them, but these are essential for the development of high-quality APIs.

In huge organisations, a large number of teams and different services have to be involved for the provisioning of interfaces. This includes teams who are responsible for integration, middleware (such as API management) or authorisation. This is particularly difficult to navigate for beginners, but it also puts experienced development teams to the test.

In addition, requirements are often ‘thrown over the wall’ to the development teams. As a result, they have very little knowledge of the stakeholders of their APIs and therefore cannot identify with them or understand what they need to deliver to satisfy their stakeholders. The users of the API are thus not perceived as customers, but as someone who creates additional work for the team, namely the development of an API, which is not one of the team's core tasks and poses major challenges.

Team Topologies as Foundation

The Team Topologies framework provides the basis for efficient software development. It distinguishes between four different types of teams: Stream-Aligned (business-oriented), Enabling (supporting), Complicated Subsystem (specialised) and Platform (accelerating). The teams interact using three different interaction patterns, either collaboratively, as-a-service or through facilitation. Exemplary interaction between the team types of the Team Topologies framework:

Image taken from the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, 2019. Used with permission.

An Enabling Team consists of experts who impart knowledge and expand the skillset of the stream-aligned teams by taking over the evaluation and testing of new tools, methods, frameworks and the like. They only support stream-aligned teams for a certain period of time and not permanently.

This article sheds light on the extent to which an Enabling Team specialised on APIs (hereinafter referred to as an API Enabling Team) can support Stream-Aligned Teams in broadening their skillset to make them fit for API design and implementation.

Tasks of an Enabling Team for APIs

The primary task of an API Enabling Team is to support other teams and train them with regard to APIs. To do this, the team must develop a workshop concept that takes into account both modern standards as well as the organisation’s circumstances and API strategy. At best, the team supports the Stream-Aligned Teams during the design and development of their first API. It is important that the Enabling Team only provides support and does not develop the API itself. As the API Enabling Team cannot be familiar with every backend technology in the organisation, the Stream-Aligned Teams must be sufficiently familiar with their technology. Once the Enabling Team has provided support, it provides documentation that enables the Stream-Aligned Teams to go through the same process independently the next time. Of course, it will also remain available in the future for special questions, reviews and the like.

An API Enabling Team is most effective when it is also involved in high-level topics and can influence the API strategy, governance and operations so that the experiences with the individual teams can be taken into account and, ideally, incorporated there.

An API Enabling Team also helps to build a vibrant API community, as it establishes the necessary contacts with the individual development teams and can thus connect them with each other.

Following a Philosophy

To be successful as an API Enabling Team, the team must be guided by the organisation's enterprise architecture and API strategy and derive its philosophy from these.

Based on the organisation's enterprise architecture, the API Enabling Team derives a golden path and identifies the procedures and tools that must be observed and used by the Stream-Aligned Teams. These can be, for example, certain architecture patterns, a prescribed API management tool or prescribed quality features.

Based on the organisation's API strategy, the Enabling Team supplements its philosophy with specific API topics. The main focus here is on aspects such as reusability, APIs as a product, user-centred development and API design first vs. code first.

It is important that the API Enabling Team makes its philosophy transparent and bases all its actions and workshops on it.

Developing a workshop concept based on the philosophy

Based on its philosophy derived from the organisation, the API Enabling Team then develops a tailor-made workshop concept:

The workshop concept consists of individual building blocks and must take into account the different levels of knowledge of different Stream-Aligned Teams. The following topics should at least be covered by the workshop concept:

• Basic functionality of an API
• User-centred API development and stakeholder involvement, including developer experience
• Various interaction patterns and their areas of application
• Creation of a data model
• API design & standard formats (e.g. OpenAPI)
• API guidelines, standards and helpful tools in the organisation and beyond
• API management in connection with the topics of security and authentication/authorisation
• Backend development (as far as possible)
• Testing

The development of such a comprehensive workshop concept requires time and expertise. Further development and improvement of the concept based on experience with the Stream-Aligned Teams is essential.

Implementing the workshop concept

To test the workshop concept, the API Enabling Team first approaches selected Stream-Aligned Teams that are open to new ideas and direct dialogue. After trialling, all Stream-Aligned Teams are given the opportunity to make use of the API Enabling Team to develop their first high-quality API. Firstly, the API Enabling Team always clarifies the requirements and expectations with the respective Stream-Aligned Team and makes its philosophy transparent. It must then clarify that APIs are the right technical solution for the tasks of the Stream-Aligned Team. It often turns out that this is not the case at all. However, if this is the case, the necessary workshops and work sessions can then be planned together in the way that best suits the Stream-Aligned Team's day-to-day work. Once the workshops have been held, the Enabling Team systematically collects feedback and integrates the Stream-Aligned Team into an API community, where team members can share problems, challenges and successes with other development teams. It is important that no Stream-Aligned team is forced into enabling if it does not want to. However, experience shows that good enabling is spread by word of mouth among teams. This automatically increases the demand for enabling.

Platform Aspects

In order to work effectively and efficiently as an API Enabling Team, the general process of how APIs are created in the organisation must be as lean and clear as possible. The team must be enabled to improve the process together with other teams. It is also a good idea to establish an API Platform Team if many parts of the existing process are not yet automated. Automated API operations support the Enabling Team in transferring knowledge more quickly and making the existing services known to the Stream-Aligned Teams rather than reinventing the wheel for each individual Stream-Aligned Team. At the same time, the offered services help to reduce the cognitive load for the Stream-Aligned Teams, who already have to learn a lot of new things during the enabling process.

Prerequisites for success

In order for the introduction of an API Enabling Team to be successful, a number of prerequisites must be met. Firstly, it is important that the team has the support of management. As the Enabling Team itself does not write any software and therefore does not deliver any demonstrable products, management must be convinced of its importance and also use the right metrics for evaluation. The number of APIs created, for example, which is often used as a metric, is only meaningful to a limited extent, as it neither says anything about the quality of the APIs nor takes into account teams for which an API was not a sensible solution.

A successful API Enabling Team also works with many other teams, mainly Platform, Complicated Subsystem and other Enabling Teams (e.g. authorisation teams, integration teams, etc.). These teams must be prepared to exchange the necessary information with the API Enabling Team which they share with the Stream-Aligned Teams in a condensed and processed form.

Another important prerequisite for the success of an API Enabling Team is to motivate the Stream-Aligned Teams to collaborate with them. This is difficult to achieve if the costs for the Enabling Team are passed on internally to the Stream-Aligned Teams. The enabling should be free of charge for all teams and it should be as simple as possible to make use of it.

Conclusion

An API Enabling Team, based on the team types introduced in Team Topologies, successfully supports Stream-Aligned Teams in publishing their first API following a well-established approach. An organisation that relies on an API Enabling Team can ensure that high-quality APIs are created, which contribute to the business strategy and success of the organisation. The Enabling Team achieves this through a customised workshop concept, which ensures that Stream-Aligned Teams learn and master all important tasks related to the creation, development and publication of APIs.

The success of an API Enabling Team is closely linked to the support of management, the willingness of other central teams to work together and the motivation of the Stream-Aligned Teams. It is only when these requirements are met that the API Enabling Team can become a critical factor in the success of your business.