This coursework requires a high level specification of the system. You are required to analyse the system and
1. Identify all groups of users;
2. Identify all functions that each group of users will be able to perform on the system;
3. List all information/material that the system will hold and their attributes e.g. a certificate has at least the following attributes: title of course studied, grade achieved, year that it was issued, name of institution, state and country where it was issued, duration of studies, etc.; and
4. Using an appropriate format, draw flow diagrams to show the sequence of interactions between the users and the system. This should be done for at least 2 functions for each user group. Although you are not supposed to implement the system at this stage, implementation consideration may be taken into account when specifying your system.
2. Instructions and Guidelines on Assessment
Important considerations for web accessible systems include:
• maintenance and management;
• hosting (how easy is it to find a company to host your web site and how much does it cost?);
• portability;
• upgrading;
• security.
2.1 Assessment
This coursework will be assessed by means of a formal report. The coursework marks are distributed, w.r.t. network design requirement analysis only, as follows:
1. Identification of user groups and functions for each user group (user requirements):
2. Identification of information that the system hold and their attributes:
3. Information flow diagrams:
4. Overall quality of the report (format, introduction, etc.):
Note that if a report is not submitted, the student will be considered not to have submitted any
coursework.
2.2 Report Guidelines
• Table of contents
• An introduction that puts the project into context and a short referenced literature review (use Havard APA Referencing standard http://referencing.port.ac.uk).
• The report must include user requirements analysis, design objectives and justify all the decisions made.
• Information flow diagram (IFD), use case, webflow diagram, or some other representation of the flow of data between the tasks and the system should be provided. The IFD format is described below. This include step-by-step description of the program(s).
Details of Information Flow Diagram (IFD)
In describing this type of diagram, we use the university database example (see Fig. 1). The IFD describes, at a high-level, the following aspects of your system:
1. Documents: any data relevant to your application (could be internal or external to your system). In IFD, documents are represented as rectangles.
• Internal documents represent data that is to be stored in the system itself (e.g., student
records, enrollment records, etc.).
• External documents represent data that is either (1) input by users or (2) generated
dynamically by the system (e.g. login and password selected by a user, a user’s transcript).
2. Tasks: any action the system performs (represented in the circles).
3. System boundary: this is represented as a rectangle. All external aspects of the system (external
documents) lay outside the rectangle and all internal aspects (internal documents, as well as tasks)
lay inside.