Interface Control Document Templates - When Systems Must Talk to Each Other
· 3 min read
I watched a company spend months integrating two systems that should have taken weeks. The problem? The two teams had different versions of what "send order data" meant. One sent XML, the other expected JSON. One included timestamps, the other didn't. One sent partial data because they thought the other system would look it up.
A systems architect told me about a painful integration project: "We had the best developers on both sides, but they made opposite assumptions about what the API should do. By the time we discovered the mismatch, we were six weeks in. We had to rewrite one entire system."
That's what happens when interfaces aren't specified clearly.