Summary
Successful Internet business solutions determine application requirements before starting the planning or development phases. Certain nonfunctional requirements, such as security, reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and manageability, are common among various types of applications and projects, and should be addressed in almost all cases. An application's needs assessment should identify the important characteristics relevant to the business tasks the application is meant to provide.
Many specific tools and technologies that exist to build networked applications are presented in each of the sections of this chapter, and you are directed to the books in Appendix A for more detailed treatments of these topics.
This chapter also presents items for consideration when working on a project with application integration requirements. Successful application integration relies on adequate planning to avoid risks and usually relies on introducing application middleware to mediate communications between existing programs and applications.
Although applications you will work on as a CISS have many diverse and unique functional requirements, a good foundation in basic application requirements (nonfunctional requirements) helps to identify and plan the development of application functions and features that make it useful and unique.