I am now on the job of extending and refactoring a set of APIs and core data structures that most of the other components depend on. The team is small (5 people ).
A manager told me that before checking in my changes, I should search throughout the code base, find out all the functions that are dependent on the APIs I have changed, and if necessary, modify them to make sure the whole software works. I was a bit astonished by this request.
In terms of procedure, I think all I should do is to test my own stuff, document, and provide instructions for others to update accordingly. What makes this request even worse is that I know unit tests are not thoroughly conducted for some components. How can I possibly be sure that my change wouldn't creat bugs in the component of somebody else? And the development is active, it's almost certain my push of changes for somebody else would create local conflicts everywhere.
Before rejecting this request, can anybody provide some other perspective to this request? What is the common practice for internal API update? Thanks.