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Integrations - How we work

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Integrations - How we work

SDLC

Funnel Plan Build Support

1. The Funnel

In order for the integrations team to have consistent planned work available to bring into milestones, we strive to have a healthy funnel of incoming work. We do this in a few ways:

  1. By reaching out to our business partners to gain an understanding of their upcoming roadmaps and how integrations and automations work will fit into that. This is the genesis of a lot of our larger programs of work.
  2. Teams reach out to us for assistance with ad-hoc work that comes up in the day-to-day.
  3. We schedule work ourselves which will improve the integrations landscape and allow us to work more efficiently and effectively with the business to achieve results.
  4. We schedule work that will achieve certain compliance, security, maintainability, and auditibility goals for the business.

2. Project Planning

Prior to scheduling an engineering task into a milestone, we need to have a good understanding of the problem, the ask, and well-defined requirements. This assists us to design a solution that meets your core business needs and does that in a reliable way. This also has a secondary benefit which is that we can properly automate the testing of integrations so that they are easy for us to support and maintain. This allows our team to stay lean and flexible so that we aren't bogged down in support activities.

We may ask you for any of the following documentation, designs, and information to help us plan your project:

  1. An intake issue/epic
  2. Project metadata (DRI, team, dates, etc.)
  3. Work breakdown plan
  4. User stories
  5. Design Diagrams
  6. Acceptance Criteria
  7. Function & Non-function requirements
  8. Test plan
  9. Your UAT plan
  10. Gantt chart showing dependencies between the ask and other team/s activities
  11. Project kick-off meeting

Note: We don't always have spare Project Management or BSA resources to devote to your project so we may ask for you to assist us in owning in these activities.

3. Milestone Process

We run 1 month long milestones (sprints) which start on the first Tuesday of the month. Our milestone calendar follows a repeating pattern of predictably scheduled rituals:

Calendar
Ritual Week before milestone Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4
Planning X (multiple sessions)        
Kickoff   X (first day)      
Retrospective         X (last day)

4. Maintenance & Ops

For integrations we have built we have logs, monitoring and alerts which automatically trigger when an issue arises in an integration or automation. We track bugs and incidents in our Integrations Work Tracker and on our Milestone Board.

If you need to report a bug or incident to us, please do so using the bug report template listed below.

For maintenance and enhancement of existing integrations please submit an issue using the correct template below.

To learn about our processes please visit the sdlc page

How to engage us

Create an issue

Pick one of the below to be directed to the correct issue template

  1. New Project
  2. Enhancement Request
  3. Bug Report

Project sizing

Once you have reached out to us, we will help you in determining the size of your project, and subsequently the types of planning assets and activities that we'll require to help things run smoothly and make your project a success.

Project Size Examples Checklist
Small (S) - Switch to sending preferred names to existing EdCast integration via the API TBD
Medium (M) - Navex Global integration (upload daily list of users to FTP server) TBD
Large (L) - Zuora to Netsuite Integration TBD
Extra Large (XL) - Switch out a core system and rebuild all integrations - Break this project down into size L or smaller projects
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