Margaret
Menzin Office:
S3209
Phone: X2704
Email:
menzin@simmons.edu
Home Phone: 781-862-5107
Office Hours: Mondays 7:00-9:00 and
10:00-2:00
Wednesdays
7:00-9:00, 10-11:00 and 12:30 -3:30
Fridays:
700-9:00 and 10:00-Bartol lunch; usually after lunch .
Note: I normally eat lunch at 12:00 or 12:30, but can move that
to meet you in the middle of the day.
The Mathematics and Computer Science Department eats at Bartol on Fridays
at 11:30. We hope you will join us.
There is no class on Friday April 10 because of Passover.
This class will be made up.
Text: Systems Analysis and Design in a
Changing World by Satzinger, Jackson, and Bard - 5th Edition
There will be no class Friday April 10, 20009. This class will be made up.
In this course you will learn about the role of the systems analyst, the many people, disciplines and technologies the systems analyst must interact with, and become knowledgeable about the various tools and methodologies the systems analyst uses. You will also follow both small and large scale projects through this process, including a group project of your own.
We will look at some traditional (E-R or Entity-Relationship diagrams and DFD or Data Flow Diagrams ) but use mostly object-oriented (UML or Unified Modeling Language diagrams ) as our vehicles.
The text carries a case study of Rocky Mountain Outfitters through the course. We will discuss this case and the text's case study for a pharmaceutical provider in class (as well as smaller examples in the text). Beginning in Section III of the course you will also work on a team to develop the analysis and design for a major upgrade of a portal for prospective Simmons students. The Communication Department's Video Production course will be generating 15 videos for our site, and the School of Management's Market Research course will probably be collaborating with you to determine what prospective students are most interested in. I am very excited that this will provide you with the opportunity to see how professionals in different fields work together on a significant project.
Also beginning in Section III you will learn to use Rational Software Modeler and/or UModel to generate the various types of diagrams you will need for analyzing your case studies.
Finally, for those of you who have not used Access, there will be a brief introduction to that database and a set of tutorials so you may learn it yourself. You will need to use it in the last part of the course.
I. The Role of the Systems Analyst (Chapters 1 2, and 3 of text)
What does the systems analyst do? Whom does she interact with? What technologies must she know about? What are the core tasks in her role?
At this point you will know that each project has the following activities: planning, analysis, design, construction,/implementation and maintenance/modification.
Depending on the methodology used, the projects may
be broken into subprojects and the each subproject may go through these phases
(iterative approach) or the total project may go through planning, then the
total project through analysis, etc. (waterfall or structured approach).
II. Planning, Project Management and Feasibility Studies (Appendices A - E of text and supplementary material)
Any project requires planning. You must define the boundaries of the project — what is the purpose of the project, what will you do and what won't you do, where does the proposed system interface with other systems or with people,. You must also determine what is a reasonable schedule for the project, what it will cost, whether or not it will pay for itself, what are the technical risks, etc.
You will learn to use Microsoft Project and/or Open project to manage a systems development program - time and resources. You will also learn how to do a preliminary feasibility study, including economic justification of a project (present-value of future savings and expenditures.) And you will learn about defining the boundary of a project.
There will be a graded problem to hand in to
demonstrate your knowledge of Project 2003 and of return on investment
calculations.
III. General Approaches to Systems Analysis (Chapters 2 , 4, 16 and supplementary material)
Introduction to structure charts, and data flow diagrams (DFDs) for process oriented models, entity-relationship (E-R) diagrams for data oriented models, use case and sequence diagrams of UML for object-oriented models. Software development life cycle (SDLC), iterative and rapid application development (RAD) approaches. COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf ) software and best-of-each-application vs. enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Insights, strengths, weakness of each approach.
IV. Requirements Specification ( above and
handouts) — the analysis begins.
Chapters 5-8 of text and supplementary material.
Who are the stakeholders and how do you make sure they are involved? Structured walk-throughs, prototypes, and use of models and UML diagrams from previous part.
Requirements specification is one of the most difficult and most important parts of system development.
A preliminary specification of system requirements is done in the planning phase. We now turn our attention to a more detailed specification. We will first look at the traditional approach (Chapters 5 & 6), spending some time writing leveled DFDs. We will work through the RMO case together in class and your team will develop the DFDs for the pharmaceutical problem (graded). This work will be done using UModel and/or Rational Rose.
We will then re-do those two cases using an object-oriented (UML) approach (Chapter 7). Again, we will work through the RMO case study in class and you will do the portal case as a graded team project.
Whether you use a traditional or an object-oriented
approach, at the end of the analysis you should step back and evaluate your
alternatives, including make-buy decisions for various subsystems. (Chapter 8).
V. Design (Chapters 9-12 of text and
supplementary material; as time allows parts of Chapters 14 -16)
We will look carefully at what a typical data repository generates in the way of useful information for us. In particular, we will see what Rational Rose (the UML design tool) generates in the way of classes, function headings, etc.
I hope to at least talk about designing inputs and outputs, with due consideration of human-computer interactions (Chapter 14). We will design some inputs and outputs for the pharmaceutical case and a number of pages for the site for prospective students. The work on the site for prospective students (graded) will be in teams.