Reference no: EM133383249

Case: North Hills College has decided to implement a new registration system that will allow students to register online as well as in person. As IT manager, you decide to set up a JAD session to help define the requirements for the new system. The North Hills organization is fairly typical, with administrative staff that includes a registrar, a student support and services team, a business office, an IT group, and a number of academic departments. Using this information, you start work on a plan to carry out the JAD session. Who would you invite to the session, and why? What would be your agenda for the session, and what would take place at each stage of the session?

CyberStuff is a large company that sells computer hardware and software via telephone and online. CyberStuff processes several thousand transactions per week on a three-shift operation and employs 50 full-time and 125 part-time employees. Lately, the billing department has experienced an increase in the number of customer complaints about incorrect bills. You have been tasked with finding out why this is happening. During your preliminary investigation, you discovered that some CyberStuff representatives did not follow established order entry procedures. You feel that with more information, you might find a pattern and identify a solution for the problem, but you are not sure how to proceed. Is a questionnaire the best approach, or would interviews be better? And whether you use interviews, a questionnaire, or both techniques, should you select the participants at random, include an equal number of people from each shift, or use some other approach? How do you proceed?

You are the lead systems analyst on a large project. A big part of your responsibilities is to handle the system requirements. Extensive interviews have taken place, and you have written down your notes using a digital pen system. This system recognizes letters and words while you write on paper and stores them in digital format on your computer. In this way, the requirements are written in unstructured natural language but stored digitally, which means they can be searched and processed. Do you think it would be worthwhile to edit the transcription and insert tags to delineate key terms in the requirements, so that a CASE tool could better analyze them? There's a lot of effort required to do the manual tagging, but the rewards could be better requirements. How would you perform the tradeoff analysis?

You are the IT director at Big Ten University. As part of a training program, you decide to draw a DFD that includes some obvious mistakes to see whether your newly hired junior analysts can find them. You came up with the diagram 0 DFD shown in Figure 5-19. Based on the rules explained in this chapter, how many problems should the analysts find?

The marketing director at Rock Solid Outfitters, a medium-sized supplier of outdoor climbing and camping gear, has asked the IT manager to develop a special web-based promotion. Rock Solid will provide free shipping for any customer who either completes an online survey form or signs up for the Rock Solid online newsletter. Additionally, if a customer completes the survey and signs up for the newsletter, Rock Solid will provide a $10 merchandise credit for orders of $100 or more.
The IT manager has asked you to develop a decision table that will reflect the promotional rules that a programmer will use. She wants you to show all possibilities, and then to simplify the results to eliminate any combinations that would be unrealistic or redundant. How will you proceed?

The IT manager at Rock Solid Outfitters thinks you did a good job on the decision table task she assigned to you. Now she wants you to use the same data to develop a decision tree that will show all the possibilities for the web-based promotion described in Part 1 of the case. She also wants you to discuss the pros and cons of decision tables versus decision trees. How shall you proceed this time?

TravelBiz is a nationwide travel agency that specializes in business travel. It has decided to expand into the vacation travel market by launching a new business division called TravelFun. The IT director assigned two systems analysts to create a flexible and an efficient information system for the new division. One analyst wants to use traditional analysis and modeling techniques for the project, while the other analyst wants to use an O-O methodology. Which approach would you suggest and why?

You were hired by Hilltop Motors as a consultant to help the company plan a new information system. Hilltop is an old-line dealership, and the prior owner was slow to change. A new management team has taken over, and they are eager to develop a first-class system. Right now, you are reviewing the service department, which is going through a major expansion. You decide to create a model of the service department in the form of a use case diagram. The main actors in the service operation are customers, service writers who prepare work orders and invoices, and mechanics who perform the work. You are meeting with the management team tomorrow morning. How would you create a draft of the diagram to present to them?

Train the Trainer develops seminars and workshops for corporate training managers, who in turn train their employees. Your job at Train the Trainer is to put together the actual training materials.

Right now, you are up against a deadline. The new object modeling seminar has a chapter on cardinality, and the client wants you to come up with at least three more examples for each of the four cardinality categories listed in Figure 6-16. The four categories are zero or many, zero or one, one and only one, and one or many. Even though you are under pressure, you are determined to use examples that are realistic and familiar to the students. What examples will you submit?