temporal coupling

Normally in enterprise application integration, when we say "send X to Y", there are two distinct aspects to be ironed out. The first is the "how" part. The second is the "what" part. When thinking of the "how" part, thoughts turn to things like interfaces and APIs and function calls and so on. When thinking of the "what" part, thoughts turn to things like strings and tables and integers and data structures. All successful examples of interconnecting A and B in EAI feature both "how" and "what". Unfortunately, the two can get terribly inter-twined leading to integration strategies that are difficult to develop, deploy and debug.