week 8

Q: Post an annotated bibliography for Part B of Assignment 2 to your blog. Your post should follow the advice given by the resources from the assignment 2 page on the course website.

A:

1: Agile software development – Wikipedia entry

The author of this entry in Wikipedia discusses almost every aspect of Agile software development starting from history of the Agile software development to criticisms over the Agile software development. In this article Agile software development is compared with traditional software development methodology – water fall method, iterative development methodology, and non-defined software development method – cowboy coding. Author touches principles behind the Agile software development methodology as well. From all these discussions the author suggests that Agile software development is suitable if there are fast changing requirements, and small skilled development group is involved. If there are clearly defined requirements, high secure development project, or larger developer involved then according to author the traditional methods are better than Agile software development methodology..

2: Highsmith, J & Cockburn, AC 2001, Agile software development: the business of innovation, Computer, Sept., vol. 34(9), pp. 120-127.

Authors of this article try to justify the initiative of the Agile software development methodology. Authors clearly expressing that the change in the business demand and process create the need of a new software development technique which can deliver the quality product quickly or on time. For example, earlier businesses belief put more effort to find out all the requirements in earlier state will reduce the cost and most of the time changes to the requirements were not accepted, but now trying to avoid changes to the requirement during the development process is considered as irresponsible behaviour of the software development team. Agile software development addresses these issues and come up with the solution to reduce the cost even the requirements are changed during the development process. Basic principles of Agile software development are having functioning program and effective team work. According to the author the success of the software development is mainly depend on the collaboration between all the stake holders of the particular software. This concept is emphasised in Agile software development process.

3: Truex, D, Baskeville, R & Klein H 1999, Growing Systems in emergent organisations, Communications of the ACM, Aug., vol. 42(8), pp. 117-123.

In this article Authors address the problems in the systems development methodologies. They argue that the business perspective only cause the problems not the software development tools. Most of the system development structures concentrate on low maintenance; this creates inability to adapt the changes in the requirements during the maintenance stage. Authors suggest a substitute solution for these, having a continuous development during the software life cycle. This will allow the information system to adapt to the organisational change, which cannot be eliminated to stay alive in this competitive world.

week 7

Q1: What were the most important concepts you learnt this week?

This week we learned Entity relationship diagram and normalization of the table structure. Entity relationship diagram is another way to graphically represent the system. This will help to identify all the possible data storages needed for the system. Normalization is a technique to design a proper database structure. This will provide facilities such as easy search and eliminate the data redundancies.

Q2: Why do you think those concepts are important?

For any Information System, data storage is an important part. If the database design is done properly then most of the run time or maintenance time errors can be avoided. If we can identify all the key fields at all the table involved then the programming also become easy, data retrieval and data search can be done in less amount of time. So these entity relationships and normalization are very important concepts.

Q3: What concepts from this week are causing you the greatest problems?

I have experiences in analysis and design and I have learnt these technics earlier in my bachelor’s degree as well, only difference I can see is the notations we use in Entity Relationship Diagram is slightly different. Other than that hope everything is under control.

Q4: How might the problems you are having be solved?

Hopefully refer the textbook and follow the lecture will solve this miner problem I have at the moment.

week 6

Q: This week you learnt about the importance of the processes used in the design of an information system’s output and user interface design. Describe any connections you can make between the output and user interface design topics you covered this week and your experience with any of CQU’s information systems (e.g. e.rolment, MyCQU, e-courses/Blackboard, Webfuse – the system that hosts this course website, OASIS – the system you use to submit assignments 1 and 2 for this course, and any others).

A:

During the interface design process, I strongly believe all the possible inputs and outputs should be considered and addressed. Also the output medium will impact on the interface design mostly, for example if the system is trying to display the output in internet then the interface should be web pages. “Output” can be defined as give the information to the user what he/she is looking for or need to have/know, but the “Interface” is provide that output to the user in a way he / she can receive it properly. Most of the Information Systems fail because of their poor user friendliness or in other words inappropriate interface designs. If the interfaces are not designed in a way that they can give proper output to the user, it is worthless. Some of our CQU information systems interfaces are designed to give information to the users, without considering the user friendliness/ attractiveness. For example, if a student has to submit an assignment online, rather than he/she is expected to remember the address of the Webfuse or check his/her email or course profile, it could be designed as a direct link from the main CQU webpage, it will reduce the time one spend to submit an assignment.