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Integration readiness checklist

Can your integration be estimated yet? Use this evidence workbook to identify known facts, unresolved dependencies, and the smallest useful experiment before agreeing scope.

Start with one flow and its owners

Use this checklist with a business process owner, the owners of both systems, and an engineer who can inspect the available interfaces. It works for API, event, and batch integrations; it does not assume a particular vendor or certify readiness.

For every item, record verified, unknown, blocked, or not applicable, a dated evidence reference, an owner, and the next action. Explain every not-applicable decision. Keep credentials and personal customer records out of the workbook.

Download the Markdown checklist

Free editable file. No account or email required. Version 2026-09-28.

Define one business transaction

Make the boundary small enough that both business and engineering owners can describe a correct outcome.

  • Name the trigger, source, destination, business owner, and outcome. Separate order creation, shipment, invoicing, refunds, and historical migration into explicit flows.
  • Record normal and peak transaction volume, acceptable delay, operating hours, and the effect of a missed or duplicated transaction.
  • List exclusions and manual approvals. Identify who resolves exceptions and who accepts the completed workflow.

Evidence to collect: A one-page flow with entry/exit conditions, peak-volume evidence, exclusions, and a named business approver.

Identify systems and access dependencies

A product name alone does not establish that the required interface is available in your environment.

  • Record exact product, version, deployment model, tenant or company boundary, extensions, vendor contact, and environment owner for each system.
  • Locate the documented endpoint or supported import/export mechanism for each required operation. Record API version, licensing dependencies, limits, and deprecation notices.
  • Confirm a representative sandbox, permitted test records, and an access approver. Record required permissions and credential rotation ownership without putting secrets in this workbook.

Evidence to collect: An environment inventory, endpoint references, and a sandbox access plan with owners and unresolved dependencies.

Agree record ownership and field mapping

Resolve meaning and ownership before designing synchronization.

  • Name the system of record for customers, products, orders, invoices, and status changes. Define which side may create or update each field.
  • Map stable source and destination identifiers, required fields, allowed values, units, decimal precision, time zones, and currency codes. Assign business rule decisions to the relevant owner.
  • Collect anonymized examples for a normal record, missing data, a corrected record, and a cancellation. Define what happens when two systems disagree or a reference record is absent.

Evidence to collect: A field-mapping sheet with source, destination, transformation, validation, owner, and anonymized sample for every required field.

Plan delivery, duplicates, and ordering

A network response does not always tell you whether a business operation completed.

  • Choose polling, events, or a batch schedule based on available interfaces and required delay. Document checkpoints and how missed records are found.
  • Define a stable business-operation identifier and how repeat deliveries are detected. Verify actual destination behavior when the same operation is submitted twice.
  • Describe timeout-after-acceptance, out-of-order updates, and concurrent edits. Agree how to check destination state before retrying an operation whose outcome is unknown.

Evidence to collect: A delivery sequence and duplicate/reordering test cases with observable expected outcomes.

Make failures recoverable

Design the recovery path as carefully as the successful path.

  • Separate transient failures from invalid business data or denied access. Define bounded retry delays, attempt limits, and handling of provider rate-limit responses.
  • Specify where failed records wait, what context an operator sees, who can correct and replay them, and how replays avoid repeated side effects.
  • Define reconciliation: compare source and destination counts, identifiers, statuses, and agreed totals over a fixed window. Give unresolved differences an owner and escalation path.

Evidence to collect: A failure matrix covering timeout, outage, rate limit, duplicate, invalid reference, and partial completion, plus a reconciliation procedure.

Bound data use and operational visibility

Collect enough evidence to diagnose the workflow without spreading sensitive records into every tool.

  • List data fields crossing each boundary, their purpose, approved destinations, retention expectations, and the person authorized to decide handling requirements.
  • Define which identifiers and error codes belong in logs, how payloads are redacted, who can inspect them, and how test data is separated from production.
  • Choose alerts tied to business impact: aged unprocessed records, repeated failures, and reconciliation differences. Assign an operator and coverage expectations.

Evidence to collect: A data-flow inventory, redacted diagnostic example, alert definitions, and named operational owners.

Specify acceptance evidence

Agree what must be demonstrated before anyone relies on the integration.

  • Write observable acceptance criteria for the normal transaction and each failure case. Include the expected destination record and a way to reconcile it to the source.
  • Test peak volume, recovery after an outage, duplicate delivery, expired access, and corrections using authorized representative data.
  • Record which results were observed in the sandbox, which depend on mocks, and which remain untested. Have the business owner review exception handling as well as the happy path.

Evidence to collect: An acceptance matrix linking each requirement to test data, expected outcome, observed evidence, and approver.

Prepare cutover and ownership

The integration needs a sustainable operating model after implementation.

  • Separate initial backfill from ongoing synchronization. Set a cutover checkpoint and decide how in-flight changes are captured.
  • Define rollback triggers and how already-created destination records will be reconciled. Reverting code alone may not reverse business transactions.
  • Assign deployment, monitoring, incident response, vendor-change review, and runbook maintenance. Include expected hosting, licensing, support, and exception-handling effort in planning.

Evidence to collect: A cutover and recovery runbook, handover owners, operating-cost assumptions, and a dated go/no-go decision.

Worked example: an order reaches the invoice system

This is a hypothetical planning example, not a client implementation or a vendor-specific API contract. A storefront creates order WEB-1042. An ERP owns customer accounts, item identifiers, and invoice numbers. The integration submits an order only after the storefront marks it approved; invoice creation remains an ERP-controlled step.

Identity and mapping
Keep WEB-1042 as the external order reference and record the resulting ERP order ID. Resolve the storefront customer ID to an approved ERP account. Map product codes to ERP item IDs; reject an unknown item for review. Carry the currency code explicitly. The business owner supplies approved pricing and rounding rules.
Unknown outcome
The ERP accepts the order, but the response times out. Before attempting creation again, use the external reference or the provider’s supported idempotency mechanism to establish whether the order exists. If that capability is unknown, mark it as a blocker for a sandbox experiment.
Reconciliation and acceptance
Reconcile approved storefront orders against ERP references over the agreed window, including pending exceptions. The duplicate-delivery test must show one intended business order; the missing-customer test must show an actionable exception without an unintended invoice. Retain observed evidence and the business owner’s acceptance.

Make a decision without a readiness score

  • Ready for scoped discovery: the flow, owners, interface evidence, and representative samples are available. Remaining assumptions are listed for investigation; this is not approval to deploy.
  • Blocked by a dependency: name the missing access, owner decision, license, or supported operation. Record who can resolve it and what evidence will close it.
  • Needs a bounded experiment: define one uncertain behavior, its sandbox test, permitted data, expected observation, time limit, and stop condition. Use the result to revise the scope.

Methodology and source notes

This original workbook starts from a business transaction and follows it through data mapping, delivery, failure recovery, acceptance, and operations. It asks for inspectable evidence instead of awarding points. Add system-specific requirements and review unknowns with the people who own them.

The primary references below inform the retry and event-delivery prompts. They are examples of engineering guidance, not proof of Kode Kinetics platform certifications or a universal provider contract. Source links checked 2026-09-28.

Bring the unknowns to a scoping discussion

Share a non-sensitive summary of the flow, systems, and unresolved dependencies. Kode Kinetics works with businesses worldwide on API and business-system integration. If the goal is reduced manual effort, use the automation value calculator to document a separate capacity scenario.

Discuss integration readiness