Reference no: EM133234862
You have been asked to build a database for a pet foster and adoption shelter. The agency is a nonprofit that takes in stray or abandoned pets and places them with foster caregivers until the pet is adopted. Foster caregivers are volunteers, though they must first be screened. The database needs to track all animals in its care, their species, breed, name, and condition. It also needs to track all approved foster caregivers and the animals currently in their care. Foster caregivers are also supposed to turn in monthly reports on the animals in their care. The database also needs to track the adoptions of the animals.
Currently, volunteers come into the shelter and fill out a paper form. After a background check, they are added to a file. Some volunteers complain that they are never contacted again. The shelter staff admits, they tend to go with foster caregivers they know, and some people get forgotten in the file. The shelter has also occasionally lost track of an animal in foster care when the caregiver failed to turn in the monthly reports. Another recurring problem is that when someone comes into the shelter looking to adopt, it is not always easy or even possible to let them know about all the animals available for adoption.
Ideally, the shelter would like people to be able to register as a volunteer online. They would like to be able to call up a list of all available foster volunteers. They would also like to be able to pull up all the animals of the kind a potential adopter is interested in and know exactly where those animals are and who is caring for them.
1. Make a list of some of the major issues with the current system used in the shelter.
2. Identity who the major stakeholders are and list them.
3. Would animals be stakeholders in this database? Explain why or why not.
4. Make a list of requirements for each of the stakeholders showing how he or she would interact with the database.
5. Make a list of business rules for the shelter.
6. What might be some of the shelter database security issues?
7. Make a list of all the nouns in the description of the shelter.
8. Take the list from practice5, and determine what you think would be the major entities.
9. List the attributes for each of the entities you listed in practice6.
10. Identify some candidate keys.