Guidelines for Planning Your Adapter

Identify the Problem

Your first step in planning an adapter is familiarizing yourself with the business process, including the problem that you're trying to solve by creating an adapter.

If you currently follow a software development lifecycle, you probably complete these tasks for your development work already. Adjust these tasks as needed for your organization's requirements and timeline.

Task	More information
Identify your users and stakeholders	Identify the users and stakeholders for the adapter, including: The integration developers who will work with your adapter. The people who work in the application for which you're building an adapter. Anyone who is a stakeholder for the automation work that the adapter will be used for.
Understand your users' and stakeholders' use case	Gather information about the business problem that the adapter is solving. If possible, meet with your users and stakeholders to collect this information. During this phase, try not to think about the implementation. Instead, make every effort to identify all of the problems that you need to solve. Identifying and then prioritizing your requirements will help prevent scope creep during development.
Review the current solution	Your organization might already have a process that addresses the use cases you're addressing. While meeting with users and stakeholders, discuss the process with them. Collect their pain points, and understand why the current process doesn't meet their needs.

Task

More information

Identify your users and stakeholders

Identify the users and stakeholders for the adapter, including:

The integration developers who will work with your adapter.
The people who work in the application for which you're building an adapter.
Anyone who is a stakeholder for the automation work that the adapter will be used for.

Understand your users' and stakeholders' use case

Gather information about the business problem that the adapter is solving. If possible, meet with your users and stakeholders to collect this information.

During this phase, try not to think about the implementation. Instead, make every effort to identify all of the problems that you need to solve. Identifying and then prioritizing your requirements will help prevent scope creep during development.

Review the current solution

Your organization might already have a process that addresses the use cases you're addressing. While meeting with users and stakeholders, discuss the process with them. Collect their pain points, and understand why the current process doesn't meet their needs.

Understand the Target Application

Familiarize yourself with the application for which you're building an adapter. Understand its APIs and demonstrate that you can connect to them outside of Oracle Integration.

Task	More information
Understand the application	Familiarize yourself with the application for which you're creating an adapter. For instance, while interviewing users, you might ask for demos of the workflows that require automation.
Understand the application's APIs	Each API represents a feature that you can include in your adapter. Familiarize yourself with the application's APIs by reviewing their documentation.
Identify the APIs that are related to the use cases you've collected	Applications can have dozens or even hundreds of APIs. However, your adapter probably doesn't need to expose all of them. For instance: Users might not need to automate everything. For example, an administrator might not want to automate the creation of user accounts. Exposing many APIs increases the clutter in the adapter. An adapter with lots of options in a drop-down list can be difficult to use. The development effort could be significant, without much return on investment. People might end up using only 10 percent of the APIs that you expose. Spend some time identifying the APIs that are related to the use cases that you collected. These APIs are the candidates for your first release, second release, and so on.
Test the APIs	Now that you understand the APIs that your adapter might need to expose, demonstrate that you can connect to the APIs outside of Oracle Integration. Having some familiarity with the APIs gives you a stronger base for your development work. Work in the environment of your choice, such as Postman or a REST client. To test the APIs, you must understand the API and its authentication scheme, which usually complies with standards such as OAuth or Basic Authentication. Note: This step is the most important preparation task. If you can't connect to an application's APIs, you can't build an adapter for the application. Spend as much time as you need to learn how to authenticate with the application's APIs. Testing the APIs is also part of creating a Postman collection. See Create a Postman Collection Using API Requests
If the application supports webhooks, test the webhooks	First, determine whether the application supports webhooks. When an event happens in an application, a webhook sends details about the event to an address, often with data. Cloud applications often support webhooks. Next, if your adapter needs to receive webhooks, test whether the webhooks are reachable. In your integrated development environment (IDE), such as Postman, test the webhook by posting something to a destination. If you don't have a server that can act as a destination and receive HTTP requests, use an online service that serves as a reachable endpoint.

Define the Requirements

After collecting information about the use cases for your adapter and identifying the APIs for each use case, define and prioritize your requirements.

Task	More information
Identify your requirements	Collect your use cases and the APIs that are used to fulfill each use case, and write requirements for your adapter. Be as specific as you prefer, and work in the format that your team usually uses. For instance, you might write a product requirement document, or you might create tickets in your issue tracking software. While you identify the requirements, focus on creating a comprehensive list, rather than prioritizing the requirements.
Prioritize the requirements	Work with your users and stakeholders to prioritize the requirements. When Oracle releases adapters to use in Oracle Integration, the adapters provide robust capabilities so that many organizations can use them to automate their business processes. However, you don't need to deliver a similarly robust adapter, especially for its first release. Instead, aim to deliver capabilities for a small set of users, and then rapidly iterate. For instance, you might aim to support four APIs for your first release, another four APIs for your second release, and so on. Whatever you plan to deliver, keep your users and stakeholders informed.
Plan your development work	For instance, you might groom your development epics, create stories, and assign your work to sprints. Or, you might identify a larger goal, such as exposing four APIs, and work toward a deadline.

Task

More information

Identify your requirements

Collect your use cases and the APIs that are used to fulfill each use case, and write requirements for your adapter.

Be as specific as you prefer, and work in the format that your team usually uses. For instance, you might write a product requirement document, or you might create tickets in your issue tracking software.

While you identify the requirements, focus on creating a comprehensive list, rather than prioritizing the requirements.

Prioritize the requirements

Work with your users and stakeholders to prioritize the requirements.

When Oracle releases adapters to use in Oracle Integration, the adapters provide robust capabilities so that many organizations can use them to automate their business processes. However, you don't need to deliver a similarly robust adapter, especially for its first release.

Instead, aim to deliver capabilities for a small set of users, and then rapidly iterate. For instance, you might aim to support four APIs for your first release, another four APIs for your second release, and so on.

Whatever you plan to deliver, keep your users and stakeholders informed.

Plan your development work

For instance, you might groom your development epics, create stories, and assign your work to sprints. Or, you might identify a larger goal, such as exposing four APIs, and work toward a deadline.