ITE-480 Exam

What is a needs assessment?

Procedures used for prioritizing and deciding how to improve a program or organization and allocate resources

Why is a needs assessment important in system analysis and design?

Identifies needs and what causes these needs and gives a plan for meeting the needs

What skills are necessary to perform an adequate needs assessment

Technical, Interpersonal, Managerial, and Analytical

(TIM-A)

Technical Skills - current technology capabilities and limits

Interpersonal Skills - How to communicate orally and in written form with stakeholders (Users, developers, managers)

Managerial - Manage projects/project change

Analytical - Understands the problems and how to fix them

Three Phases of the NA

Investigation, Data Collection, Data Use

(IDD, or Iced Dunkin Donuts)

Investigation - what are the needs

Data Collection - Surveys or Interviews; Focuses on What, Who, Where, and How

Data Use - How can we use the collected data to meet the requirements?

What are requirements?

What the system must do

Why are requirements often poorly documented?

Difficult to document, too long, contain assumptions, do not reflect the right things

Types of Requirements

Functional - The "What"

What is needed for the system to work
Example: A user should be able to generate and send an e-mail in g-mail

Non-Functional - The "How"

Hidden areas of the system that are important to the users even though they may not realize it. The factors that relate to the system's overall success i.e. scalability, reliability, and security

What is Premature Design?

Designing too early, usually during requirements process

Why is premature design problematic?

solution hopping/assumptions, analysis paralysis, lack of diverse input, unproductive

Why is cleaning up requirements important and how do you go about doing it?

May not necessarily be "perfect" the first draft.
We need to reduce the volume of requirements by removing conflicts, redundancies, and design assumptions.
Separate functional from non functional.
Find commonalities and put them in the area that makes the most sense.

Traceability

Makes sure that what the stakeholders wanted is what was produced

Why do traditional expressions of functionality lead to less than desirable results?

- Can be too complex for user to understand
- Easy to write duplicate/Conflicting requirements
- Does not give a full view of what system will accomplish

Give examples of traditional development tools

Requirements Specifications
Functional Decompositions
Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs)
ERDs
Prototypes

How are use cases better than functional decomposition, DFDs, ERDs, and Prototypes

Functional Decomposition is geared to structured development. Not suitable for web-based and object-oriented development.

DFDs (focus on what happens inside the system) and ERDs (show how data is stored) can cause confusion to users and stakeholders; too much detail

Prototypes encourage quick/dirty coding. Too much focus on UI. Can be mistaken for functional system.

Use Cases - Simplistic; Focus is simply on requirements which makes them easily identified by users; more effective

Goals of use cases?

- Show interactions b/w system and actors
- Neglects implementation-specific language
- Keeps details at a general level
- Appropriate amount of use cases

What roles do use cases provide as tools of requirements specification?

Drive requirements gathering to successful end product.

Business Rule

How a company operates (written and unwritten)

Iterative/Incremental Approaches

Facade (Outline) - Outline scope and show basic, essential, and high-level interactions

Filled (Widen) - Adding detail to use cases

Focused (Focus) - Highlights clear project requirements. By the end, you will have defined the system and should be able to build a successful application

Discuss increasing levels of granularity in development stages.

Granularity - Scope of individual use cases

Too narrow granularity = missing important/valuable details

Too broad = more complex, less readable

Choose granularity according to development effort

traditional and Holistic Iterative/Incremental methods

Waterfall method
Linear model. Software developed one step at a time. Once step is complete, move on to the next.

Rapid Application Devolpment (RAD)
Incorporates Users in Development

Spiral model
iterations to refine scope and reduce risk

Staged delivery
Cutting the project into smaller pieces

What is holistic?

view of the whole project is maintained through a strong vision of project architecture

What is iterative

Redoing something several times, improving it each time (in richness, comprehensiveness, and consistency).

What is incremental

Creating something piece by piece and adding those pieces to the whole

Goals of HI/I

The goal is to achieve adaptivity; capability of making suitable or fitting a specific situation

Principles of HI/I

Learn the Art of "Good Enough" Quality. Don't focus on getting the system in perfect, error free condition. Focus on getting the system in a state that is deployable

Divide and Conqueror
Divide up the tasks among the team.

Create Demonstrable Deliverables
Don't show business people design documents, show them something that works. ex. running code.