API Versioning Strategy Planner

Most versioning failures are discovered in production.

API versioning problems are rarely discovered during design — they surface later, when a change assumed to be minor breaks a production client that parsed a response field in a way nobody anticipated. This checklist scores a versioning strategy against the decision points that actually prevent this: a shared, written definition of what counts as a breaking change, visibility into which consumers use which version, machine-readable deprecation signals, and a documented minimum notice period before removing support for an old version.

• →Weights having a written, shared definition of 'breaking change' as one of the highest-value checks
• →Covers client version visibility — the ability to predict deprecation impact before acting on it
• →Flags machine-readable Sunset/Deprecation headers as distinct from documentation-only deprecation notices
• →Includes automated testing of old, still-supported versions as a distinct, often-skipped check
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