Week 12

1.What was the most difficult assessment item you completed in COIS20025 this term (not counting the examination which is not until the examination period)?

  Blog 1 and Assessment Item  2 were the most difficult part, in which Academic essay for Unified Modeling Language and Data design for the Cornucopia University was prepared.

2.What was difficult about it and how would you suggest it could be improved?

Referencing and researching UML topics were the most difficult part because good UML articles were not in university database.

3.Name three (3) things you learnt this term in COIS20025.

Now I know how information systems are developed for companies.I got good idea about ERDs, Requirements Modeling and Process Models.Major duties of System analysts  

4What career are you working towards?

Systems analyst, software engineer, database administrator, network administrator and end-user support professional.

5.How will you be able to use the knowledge and skills learnt in this course in your future career?

In future career I can use this knowledge when I get a job as systems analysts because I know what duties they perform, when information systems are developed. 

Week 10

Perfective maintance:                                       

 The perfective maintance is only valuable to the cornucopia university student administartion only if the universityu decides to stay with the system for a long period. Perfective maintance involves changing an operational system to make it more reliable, efficient, or maintainable. The cornucopia university works on  a centralised system which needs to be reliable and efficient.Perfective maintance is one of the most economical,less risky and very easy to maintain. Perfective maintance is usually cost effective during the middle of the system’s operational life.   

 Corrective maintance:     

     In the corrective maintance, the maintance work that could affect the system must be performed first in the test environment and then migrated towards the cornucopia university student administration.this type of corrective maintance is strictly required for the cornucopia university student administration because, a lot of work is performed manually and there are chanes of mistakes. Corrective maintance will daignose and corrects error in the operational system of the cornucopia university student administration.to avoid introduction of new problems,all maintance work will require careful analysis before making changes.The best maintance approach for cornucopia university student administration will be a scaled-down version,where investigation, analysis, design and testing are performed before implimenting any solution.

 Preventive maintance:                                          

To avoid problems ,preventive maintance requires analysis of areas where problems are likely to be occurred. The cornucopia university student administration sustem requires to put special attention on such types of maintance because as it is laways said “prevention is better than cure”. This type of maintance can help the system to foresight the problems and eliminate them before they occur. The universitie’s system is very complex and requires such type of maintainance to avoid problems and keep the system up-to-date.

 Adaptive maintance:                                    

    The need of asaptive maintance usually arrises from business environment changes which normally do keep on ocurring in the cornucopia university because of steady changes in the students and their details.Adaptive maintance is type of maintance which makes the system more user friendly and easy to use to lower down the complication in understanding the system. The cornucopia university student administration is a centralised system where adaptive maintance is neede to agreat extent because genearally centrlised systems are very complicated and not easy to understand. Adaptive maintance makes makes such system easy to understand and easy to use.

Week 9

There are four possible approaches to change one information system to another and they are

• Direct Cutover

This approach causes the changeover from old system to the new system to occur immediately when the new system becomes operational. Direct cutover usually is the least expensive changeover method because the IT group has to operate and maintain only one system at a time. If Cornucopia University selects this approach to change to Student Record and Course Selection Systems, it immediately changes the system to a new system. Problems may occur in detecting minor errors and major errors, major errors in the system can make the system to work abnormally and less stable. System may have when it starts operating.

• Parallel Operation

Parallel operation requires that both systems run simultaneously for a specified period, resulting in the slowest method .This method requires both the old and new information systems operate fully for a specified period. Data is input into new and old systems and output generated by the new system is compared with the equivalent output from the old system .Old system is terminated if users, management and IT group are satisfied. Change over to Student Record and Course Selection Systems using this approach is a very costly process. University need to pay for both old and new system. If the new system doesn’t work properly they can use their old system. But this operation is not practical for Cornucopia University if the old and new systems are incompatible technically or operating environment cannot support both the systems.

 

• Pilot Operation

The Pilot operation changeover involves implementing complete new system at a selected location of a company. This is combination direct cutover and parallel operation methods. A new sales reporting system, for instance might be implemented in only one branch office or a new payroll system might be installed in only one department. In this example: the group that uses the new system first is called the pilot site. During pilot operation the old system continues to operate the entire organization including the pilot site. Changeover to SRCSS using this approach reduces risks of system failure .This a good approach for Cornucopia University to change their current system, operating both the systems for only the pilot site is less expensive than a parallel operation for the university.

• Phased Operation

This method allows you to implement the new system at a selected in stages, or modules. You can implement each subsystem by using any of the other three changeover methods. This is combination direct cutover and parallel operation methods. If University uses this approach, risks of errors or failures are limited to that module only. Approach is recommended for University to develop a new information system because it’s a less expensive operation.

 

 

 

 

Week 8

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/uml/

This site provides good information about how to use UML ,what are basics of UML?.It provides the procedure to write good use cases and also about use case modelling.This helpsorganizations to develope information systems properly.

http://www.uml.org/

This is a good site which gives good information and gives good links about UML.How to use about objects is discussed here.

Secure Systems Development with UML By Jan Jürjens

This is book which gives details information about UML and how it can be used to develope Information systems.

ARTICLES

John D Binder 2007, ‘Aerospace America. New York, Vol. 45,pp 22(Online ProQuest)

Donald Golden,Victor Matos 2006, ‘Introducing the Unified Modeling Language into the Information Systems

Curriculum’,Journal of Information Systems Education,vol. 17(1),pp 83-92(online ProQuest)

Week 7

1)Name an advantage of using UML. Explain why it is an advantage
A)UML helps in professionally designing and documenting the software system before its is coded.So in advance we will be able to know what type of system is going to be created.
This will result in lower overall costs, more reliable and efficient software, and a better relationship with all parties involved.

2)Name a disadvantage of using UML. Explain why it is a disadvantage.
A)UML currently lacks support for capturing, representing, expressing, and exploiting certain architectural concerns whose importance has been demonstrated through research on software architectures. In particular, UML lacks direct support for modeling and exploiting architectural styles, explicit software “connectors” and global architectural constraints.

week 5

DATA DICTIONARY                                 

 Process name          : User Selection Process

Process number       :  1.0

Purpose                   : The purpose of this process is for the customers check whether  the given item is available or not.  

Input Data Flows     :Selection and Availabilty

Output Data Flows  :User selection details

Process description  : Here input for selection is coming from external entity named customer ,another data flow is fom the data store named   inventory  To check whether the item is available or not. After the selection  is done details of the data is stored in a data store named tranaction.

 Process name          : Payment process

Process number       :  2.0

Purpose                   : The purpose of this process is for the customers to pay and get their refund back.

 Input Data Flows     :Payment,Transaction details and Charges

Output Data Flows  :Payment Details,Balance/Refund

Process description  : This process is used for doing all the payment which is related to accounts.This allows customers to pay for their dvd that they had rented.Data is coming from external enitity named customer as payment,then the transaction details are inputted from data store named transactions,then at last the charges for the dvd which is stored in data store named charges is also inputted. Output data flow is in the form of Payment details and is  stored in data store named  transaction .

 Process name          : Status process

Process number       :  3.0

Purpose                   :The purpose of this process is to check status of the dvd,so that customers will know when the dvd will be available. 

Input Data Flows     :User Selection,inventory details

Output Data Flows  :Status

Process description  : This process will allow customers to know whether the DVD is available or when the DVD will be  available.After the selection process the data is inputted into to the process,in which this process check for details of the dvd and gives back the status.    From the data store named inventory all the details about the DVD or DVDs is retrieved and the status is given to external entity named customer.

Week 4

Week 4

Week 3

1.What is Unified Modelling Language (UML)?

A) UML is one of the modelling tools and techniques used in systems analysis phase for  Systems Development Life  Cycle(SDLC).To get the systems requirement document Unified  Modeling Language is used.Accordng to D Binder (2007,p.22)  ‘Unified Modeling Language (UML) is  a general purpose modeling language that includes a standardized graphical notation used  to create an abstract model of a system. It is designed to specify, visualize, construct  and document software-intensive systems (Eiglsperger,Gutwenger,Kaufmann & Kupke 2004).UML uses class diagrams to show generalizations, associations, aggregations, and compositions in one picture.UML Class diagrams are done by a layered graph drawing paradigm which has large and deep structural information (Eiglsperger,Gutwenger,Kaufmann & Kupke 2004).
 Eiglsperger,Gutwenger,Kaufmann & Kupke(2004,p.190) indicates that ‘a UML class diagram can be modeled as a mixed hierarchical graph G=(V,A,E) associated with two kinds of connections: arcs representing the generalizations in the set A, edges representing the associations in the set E,as well as labels’.
2)How might UML be used in information systems development?

A)Uml can be used as a bridge between systems analysis and database implementation so that it help to improve the information system development(Golden,Matos 2006).According to Golden & Matos(2006) UML Diagrams have replaced entity-relationship data flow diagrams and structured charts for information systems.when using obect-oriented system development UML can be used effectively. Its seen that for creating complex Business applications or Information systems Projects Objects and Object Oriented Development Methodologies are used(A. Hodgett 2003).A Hodgett (2003) noted that ‘The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been adopted by the Object Management Group as a standard language for object-oriented systems development’.Latest version of UML that is UML 2 which have high level of precision,improved language organization,improved ability to model large-scale software systems,good support for domain-based specialization and strengthed various modeling concepts resulting in a simplified and more consistent language(Selic 2006)
3)What journals might be useful to search for articles about UML?
A)IBM Systems Journals ,International Journal of Information Technology , Journal of Database Management are some of the good journals usefull for searching these type of articles.

REFERENCES

John D Binder 2007, ‘Aerospace America. New York, Vol. 45,pp 22(Online ProQuest)

Donald Golden,Victor Matos 2006, ‘Introducing the Unified Modeling Language into the Information Systems

Curriculum’,Journal of Information Systems Education,vol. 17(1),pp 83-92(online ProQuest)

Markus Eiglsperger, Carsten Gutwenger, Michael Kaufmann & Joachim Kupke 2004,’Automatic layout of UML class diagrams in orthogonal style’,Information Visualization,Vol.3,Iss.3,pp. 189-208,(online ProQuest)

Richard A. Hodgett 2003,’The Acceptance of Object-Oriented Development Methodologies in Australian Organizations and the Place of UML in Information Systems Programs’viewed 29 july 2007, http://proceedings.informingscience.org/IS2003Proceedings/docs/022Hodge.pdf

B.Selic 2006,’UML 2: a model-driven development tool’,IBM Systems Journal , Vol.45.3 , PP.607-620(Infotrac)

Week 2

1.What are the Cornucopia University student records and course selection systems?
A. The  Cornucopia University student record system is handled by creating a student account by filling a form which    has the following student records such as student name, gender, residential address, mailing address, telephone  number, mobile number,   student ID (if known), name and contact number of an emergency contact person.
   Student has to login to Course selection system and fill the course selections for the coming year  ,if there is  no time table or pre-requisites  problem then  course selction details are mailed to the student.
2.What are the current problems with the Cornucopia University student records and course selection systems?
A.The  Cornucopia University student records and course selection systems has some problems due to a single section handling all the proccess,that is Student administration system.Both are delayed process since its taking time to sent all the information to students email.
3.What information do you need to find out about the Cornucopia University student records and course selection systems to develop a detailed understanding of the current system?
A.Information about the student records,faculties ,courses and finance are needed to develope a detailed     understanding  about the current system.