Constraints

• Are the constraints identified logical, valid and justified?

• Are the suggested steps taken to exploit constraints feasible?

There are many constraints that will arise while working on a project. It is important to identify some of these constraints so that its impact can be minimised.

Normal life events can just get in the way and are not always easy to predict. While some events are planned in advance, there are definitely times when things just come up with short notice. Similarly, all team members are enrolled in different courses, hence they will have different assignments and deadlines throughout the term. A way to mitigate this issue would be to try and look at all known commitments and to plan around them and let the team know when you will be unavailable. Most courses make available the release and due dates of assignments. This would help in planning for the term. For events that are not previously foreseen, it is important for team members to let the rest of the team know as soon as possible.

Having not used Confluence and Jira before, this likely to be a constraint for the team as we have had to spend time figuring out how things work. We are still unsure how to link Github with Jira. So this is still a constraint for us. A way to try and resolve this issue would be to email course staff and ask for assistance or ask other students if they know how to do it. Also just testing elements to see how they work will be beneficial in finding interesting features and learning how things work.

Another big constraint that we have is that we have a very limited spec. As we are given no overall context in how the project fits together, we are forced to make a lot of assumptions about what is required and why it is needed. This greatly impacts the way that we are able to design our solution. As there is no one that is able to clarify our understanding of the project, we are forced to just go with what we think. A way to help improve this constraint would be to discuss our understanding with other groups and try and determine if our understanding is correct.

Without knowing how other API will work it will be difficult to design our known. At this point it is difficult to determine how information and data will be sent between these APIs and if they will be compatible. To lesson the impact that this has on us, we will provide good documentation on how our API will work and its requirements. Since we will be able to choose the other APIs that we will use we will be able to choose the one that best fits our API.

Our budget would provide constraints on how we implement our API. This would affect the way that we choose to send our invoice, as SMS would require the use credit. Our budget would also impact where we choose to host our API during deployment. This could affect the overall performance of our solution.