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.11. S**•
Integration
The degree to which a system needs to interoperate or exchange data with other systems.
• Technology: The need to introduce new technologies into our application environment increases the need for planning via BDUF. There are many examples of this. For instance, an older system using a desktop interface may need to move to a web browser interface. Or we may find that an existing technology, such as an operating system or database system, is obsolete and no longer supported, forcing as to move to a different, modem technology. We may decide to introduce a new third-party technology, such as a workflow component that will orchestrate work throughout an administrative system. This could be highly beneficial, but it also may force us to integrate it in complicated ways with many existing modules and programs. These kinds of situations cry out for BDUF. In many cases, this would include not just planning but also conducting a preliminary “proof of concept” (PoC) project. PoC projects are a great way to ensure that a new technology works both by itself and with other existing technologies.
Technology
The degree to which a system needs to be built or enhanced using new, unproven, or not previously integrated information technologies.
5.6.3 Team Characteristics: Driven by and Fitting with Requirements
There is an old saying that “form follows function.” For example, there is a reason why most cars today look so much alike: automobile engineers in different companies are trying to maximize efficiency by making auto bodies slip through the air with minimum drag. Given that everyone is subject to the same laws of physics, all these engineers in their respective wind tunnels end up converging on similar-looking automobile shapes.
The same idea is true for systems project teams: Organizations with similar requirements will be driven toward teams that look similar—team size, skills specialization, and so on. More specifically, increasing requirements lead to increasing team characteristics. This is true for both functional and non-functional requirements, although in somewhat different ways:
• • IT team size: High functional requirements will tend to increase IT team size, including the number of developers needed. This is simply because we need more programmers to code all those features. This is why we place this factor closer to the functional requirements sector of the radar chart. As our team size increases, we especially need more BRUF, simply because it becomes much more difficult to communicate informally as the team gets significantly larger than a single Scrum team (e.g., more than ten IT team members).
IT team size
The number of team members in the information technology development team.
• IT team skill sets: In contrast to the previous point, high non-functional requirements will tend to increase IT team skill sets (more so than IT team size), because we may need specialists in areas such as atthitecture, infrastructure, networking, and security. This is why we place this factor close to the non-functional requirements sector of the radar chart. This may also tend to increase overall IT team size, but less directly (as many of the specialists we use may only work on the project on an occasional, part-time basis). BDUF documentation often becomes important here, as specialists create technical designs for implementing new or upgraded components, infrastructure, data communications, or security.
IT team skill sets