Business Systems Analysis topics

The main topics to cover on the subject of Business Systems Analysis are as follows:

1. Systems development environment and Systems Development Life Cycle
2. Project management concepts for Business Systems Analysis
3. Determining systems requirements and requirement prioritization
4. Evaluating and choosing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) packages
5. Soft systems methodology (SSM), including rich-picture building
6. On Use Case Diagrams and Activiity Diagrams (in UML)
7. On design strategies and systems implementation
8. Basic ideas in Software Quality Assurance
9. On software testing

Class exercise
Rich picture building exercise in class: A manufacturing company located in Mainland China produces toys for a big business customer located in USA. The manufacturing company has 2 major suppliers of parts that are located near the company's plant. The management team of the company is not happy with the manual system for purchasing parts from the 2 major suppliers. They feel that there is a need to purchase a software system for parts procurement. Based on this information, you are required to construct a rich picture and fill in other details of the case as you see fit.

An example of a rich picture:

Key concepts to cover in workshops:

• SDLC
• Tangible and intangible benefits in software projects
• Tangible benefits: how the project deliverables can create benefits is clear; benefits can be measured in quantitative term, preferably in money term; the benefits of a project can be assessed with clearly defined and widely accepted evaluation criteria; project benefits are easy to understand; uncertainty of project is low.
• Intangible benefits: their characteristics are the opposite of tangible benefits. Examples:
• software application that creates competitive advantage to the company.
• Software application that improves quality of work life for employees.
• Activity Diagrams: initial node; finish-activity node; decision node; merge node; activity
• CASE tools: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150585220212819; also refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engineering
• IS project roles: business analyst, infrastructure analyst and change management analysts
• Gantt chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
• Main strengths of the waterfall methodology
• Rich picture building
• Selection criteria of COTS software
• Use case diagrams (e.g. actor; extend relationship)
• Prototyping, including throwaway prototyping:
• Used when business requirement/ business value is clear but user requirement (e.g. in terms of software external design) is not clear
• Prototyping enables users to meaningfully participate in software external design
• Prototyping a rapid application development approach to software development.
• Software quality, e.g. usability, maintainability, efficiency

Reference
Lecture notes: https://www.facebook.com/messages/1043891850#!/media/set/?set=a.10150196289562090.347036.713727089&type=3