A reputation system does not exist in a vacuum; it is small machine in your larger application. There are a bunch of fine-grained connections between it and your various data sources, such as logs, event streams, identity db, entity db, and your high-performance data store. Connecting it up will most likely require custom programming to connect the wires between your reputation engine and subsystems that were never connected before. This step is often overlooked in scheduling, but from our experience can take as much as 1/3 or even 1/2 of total project development time. There are usually small tuning adjustments that are required once the inputs are actually hooked up in a release environment.

This chapter will help you understand how to plan for connecting the reputation engine to your application, and what final decisions you will need to make about your reputation model.

There will always be adjustments to your model. This is why a flexible underlying platform is crucial to the long-term success of your reputation system. In Planning Your System's Design we listed some metrics you'll need to understand how your model is performing. Now we provide you with tools to adjust and debug your model during the development and early deployment phases. For post deployment adjustment and abuse, see Application Integration, Testing & Tuning (SUMMARY)