Integration failures hide in the docs
Patterns we reuse in the Integration Risk Clinic when partner PDFs contradict live traffic.
Partner documentation often describes the happy path and a polite error code list. Production teaches you about timeouts, partial writes, and retries that create duplicates.
Clinic exercises ask trainees to annotate a contract with three columns: claimed behavior, observed behavior, and unanswered questions. Unanswered questions become the partner questionnaire.
Idempotency keys, webhook ordering, and clock skew show up in almost every session. We treat them as analysis topics, not late-night fire drills.
A finished risk register is useful only if someone owns each amber row. Training ends when owners and review dates are filled in.