IP 4 System Architecture Aligned with System Requirements

IT487-1702A-01 IT Capstone I

IP 4 –System Architecture Aligned with System Requirements

Development of Student Attendance and Performance Management System for a Large University

5-3-2017

Table of Contents

1. Overview of Company and Client Business Case3

2. Complete Features and Trade-off Analysis 9

3. System Architecture 12

4. Technical Design 15

References 19

Overview of Company and Client Business Case

1.1Name of company

Softec Network and IT Solutions

1.2 Brief Introduction to the Company

Softec Network and IT solutions is a CMMi 5 level IT company deals the development of customized IT applications, Database applications, e-commerce applications, Mobile based solutions, custom enterprise and IT service solutions and client maintenance and services to the customers and corporate. This company started in 2003 as a small enterprise to provide the services of IT related application maintenance. In 2011, company expanded its core IT employee and started the development of IT solutions for corporate and government entity. At present, there are 170 regular customers are integrated with this company and satisfied with its services. There are 1200 high skilled employees are servicing in the company. Softec Network and IT solutions deals the custom projects of IT around the globe. There are 35 overseas customers currently attached with the company. The annual turnover of the company is $ 13 Billion.

Softec Network and IT Solutions provides the customized networked application development for large firms, corporate, health care, government bodies etc. The company has tremendous expertise in the field of development of new and legacy networked applications. The networked application for student attendance monitoring system for a large university is suited under the expertise of the company. Similar categories of applications have already been developed and all these developed applications are running successfully on client platform.

1.3 Client Case Overview

The client business case is to develop the online interface for the attendance monitoring system for a large university. This business case is very important for the current environment of university to manage the all aspects related with the student’s attendance. The online attendance monitoring system enables the students to verify its presence to lectures, laboratories by mobile or desktop interfaces via the Internet. The teachers and parents also view the performance of student attendance to monitor its ward with detailed records via the Internet services. This online interface for student attendance monitoring makes electronic interface for attendance data that can be used for any process of university grading and marking system with obtained attendance

Softek Network and IT solution has a team for the development of such type of innovative systems. Team members have rich expertise for analyzing the requirements, design of the system, coding and implementation of such categories of networked applications for mobile and desktop based interfaces.

1.4 Client Application Solution

This is the client application solution. This is so because the university has the network infrastructure for its stakeholders such as teachers, students and other staffs. The university network services are handled by the various categories of servers such as , LAN, DHCP, Proxy, Fil, database and web servers. Hence, the attendance monitoring system is an application solution that will be deployed on web server and database server of the university.

2.Application Requirement Elicitation and Strategy

2.1 Requirement Elicitation Process

The requirement elicitation is conducted under the analysis phase of the requirement engineering(Pressman, 2014). The requirement elicitation includes the following activities by the development team members.

• Information gathering activities such as questionnaire, interviews, survey, and university site visits are performed to gather the requirements related with the system.
• A set of questions are prepared with related domain of the problem and all stakeholders such as teachers, administrators of the university, some students are asked for the solution of prepared questions.
• Many sessions of the interviews with the teachers, students and admin people of the university have been defined and conducted as per the schedule to get relevant details about the attendance monitoring system.
• Survey is conducted through the open questions and opinions from large numbers of university stakeholders and relevant opinions are gathered for further analysis.
• The university officials and other important stakeholders of the university are interviewed to get the vital information and other relevant information about the student attendance and criteria that is enforced by the university time to time with semester wise fashion.

2.2 Main Stakeholders to Eliciting the Information

The stakeholders from that the information of attendance system of the university is being elicited are as follows.

• University employees: The registrar, faculties and teaching staffs, clerical staffs, administrators of classes, coordinators of classes etc.
• Students: The students such as students from each of the course, class coordinators, mentor of the classes, alumni students etc.
• Regulatory Bodies: The regulatory bodies such as education department of state, education regulatory body of higher education, research, and different types of education regulatory bodies and unit’s directors and representatives.

2.3Questions need to be Answered

There are many questions need to answered. There are also so many reasons behind the answer of the answers of the questions. Following questions are needed to answer.

• Is the attendance is marked by teacher regularly with online system: This is ethical question related with the teaching staffs of the university. If this is considered mandatory, then system should have a constraint to prevent the teaching staff to delay the marking of attendance on online portal.
• What is criteria to consider the student is not absent: The solution defines the present condition, granted leaves such as On Duty, Medical etc. to the student case where attendance would be marked or not.
• What percentage of attendance is required to permit the students for end term examination: The solution of this question provides the definition of constraints which calculates the total attendance for the examination appearance?
• What would the marks of the basis of percentage of attendance: The solution gives the path to define the marks criteria based on obtained attendance.
• How many ways the attendance can be given to the students: The solution of this question provides the consolidation for the definition of the attendance marking criteria.
• Is teaching staff and students access the system from home: the solution of this question gives the scope of accessibility of the system.

2.4Implementation of Elicitation Strategy

The requirement elicitation strategy is implemented through the various processes and methods definition(Rouibah, & Al‐Rafee, 2009).

• Schedule: The schedule for the interviews, meets, questionnaire, surveys etc. are created to follow to elicit the requirements and gather the important information.
• Visits: the university visits are taken to get the details of the requirements of the mentioned system.
• Team Cohesiveness: The defined team functional responsibilities to elicit the requirements are defined and track records are documented.

3.System Components and Design Requirements

The system components and design of these components are next step that is performed after the elicit of the requirements of the student’s attendance and performance management system of the selected university.

3.1 System Components and Design Requirements

Following system components and designs are required to build the open system network application for the given system.

• The system components such as actors, use cases are modeled from the elicited requirements.
• Use case model is required to obtain the user level requirements model to provide the user and system interaction.
• Activity model design is developed to predict all the activities of the users and system for functional aspect.
• Sequence model Design is taken to make the sequence with events that arises between the system and various actors of the system
• Functional Model design is developed to model all the system and information flow with the process level decomposition of the elicited requirements

3.2 Design Solution Address to Customer Needs

The design is taken in such a fashion that it addresses all the facts of the specified requirements with respect to all the users or customers of the system. All the users have special scope with system to interact and perform the defined role.

3.3Specification that Proposed System Addresses

The proposed application addresses the following specific information with respect to the system and users.

• The application addresses the view oriented information which causes the activities to be perform soon.
• The application addresses the importance of category wise record maintenance to manage the group.
• The application addresses the 24 x 7 hour and 7 days in a week functionalities related with the system which application depends

4.Methodology for Application Development Process

There are so many methodologies such as Classic Life Cycle, Agile, concurrent, incremental and many more for the application development process.

4.1 Selection of System Development Methodology

The system development methodology is selected here is classic life cycle system development. This methodology is robust methodology and also provides the scheduled structured of the system development. There are four phases in this system development methodology ("What are the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases?", 2017). These phases are Analysis, design, Coding & testing and Implementation & Maintenance. Each phase of this system development methodology starts after the finish of its previous phase accepts the first phase and it is starting phase of the system development.

4.2 Chosen Methodology Alignment with Business Case

The business case such as application development for the student attendance and performance management is best suited the selected methodology for system development. This is due to fact that the selected methodology spends too much time to specify the requirements and correct specification of requirement for the given business case is very much important to succeed the finalization of the project by the company.

5.Conclusion

The application development is a systematic approach in the field of computer and information technology where a development life cycle model is followed. The network based application requires more elaborative requirement elicitation methodology to include all the artifacts behind the application. Softek Network and IT solutionmust develop the networked application for a large university. The application is student attendance monitoring and performance management system which requires the team work from company side to specify the requirements from various standard methodologies of software development. Software development life cycle model must have to be followed to develop high quality application for the university.

Complete Features and Trade-off Analysis

2.1 A list of the deliverables based on the system requirements and their needs as listed below:

a)Attendance of students is maintained on the daily basis

b)Students and teachers are provided with separated username and password

c)For each subject or course, attendance is maintained

d)The student’s attendance reports are based on weekly and monthly basis

e)System will also help in evaluating attendance eligibility criteria for each student

1.2 Complete a trade-off analysis

f)Understanding the application

g)Do proper planning or requirement gathering

h)Scheduling

i)Developing candidate solution for online interface on attendance management system

j)Performing trade studies

k)Performing cost benefit analysis

l)Recommendation of alternation solution

m)Testing the system

n)Installing and maintaining the system

1.3 Update and finalize your requirements based on the trade-off analysis

• System is easy to use and trouble free
• User interface design should be attractive
• Reports will be generated efficiently
• For entering attendance, it is fast way
• System should be very reliable

1. The tasks that can be completed simultaneously to reduce development time and cost as listed below:

• Document is designed officially and it needs to be assigned from major stakeholders, after the key and main ideas of project are identified.
• There is also need to define system boundaries or limits for manager of project and as well about the project.
• Proper plan of resources is needed; each project resource is assigned to some function points and because of this the maintenance cost can be assumed to be lower. [Phillips 2002]

1. Milestones with due dates and dependencies

Gantt Chart: For resource distribution, project planning and completion dates

Graph: Showing Resource Distribution and Completion dates for tasks

System Architecture

Stakeholder Requirements

There are three stakeholders of the system application ‘Student Attendance Performance Management System. These three stakeholders and teacher, student and admin staffs of the university.

Application Requirements

• Computing platforms such as Mobile Device, desktop systems, Laptop machines etc.
• Operating system platform such as Windows, Linux for Desktop and Laptop Machines and Android and IOS systems for Mobile devices.
• Network and web servers for online web and networking computing environment.
• Database servers instance for attendance data reading and writing.
• Users login interface and authorization level assignment for accessing the application in online virtual platform.

Modules

There will be need of various modules under the application to manage the performance of student attendance. These modules must be coupled with the system.

Dependencies

• Network and web service availability to open the application to enter the student attendance for report generation and performance extraction.

System Interaction

The system is required to interact with external system resources like a database for the following purpose.

• Reading the stored student attendance for the application to generate the performance score, Attendance Marks allocation.
• Writing the student attendance and allocated marks for permanent storage.

System requirements

The system requirements are proposed under the SRS (Software Requirement Specification) Document. The requirements of system are defined through the verification and validation processes with the current systems and whatever proposed under SRS (Ellis-Braithwaite, Lock, Dawson, & King, 2015).

Cost and Quality

The cost of the system design of “Student Attendance and Performance Management System” is derived from the following aspects of the system development and implementation.

• Network and server’s hardware implementation in university premise
• Terminal and workstations provision for the teachers, admin staffs
• Modules coding and testing efforts by software development team members.

The future set based on the design requirements need the multiple set of modules. The application of “Students Performance Management System” is a multi-modular application where teacher, student, and admin staff interfaces are primary module based requirement. The internal application layer must have the business logic modules to process the student attendance of various subjects of courses (Offutt, 2002). The database layer also requires many modules to retrieve and post the student attendance data.

Business Process

The design is high level to low level system design. The high-level system design includes the user’s interactions design documents such as use case, use case scenarios, sequence and collaboration designs (Swenson, 2005). The design documents provide the system top level functional aspects with respect to the system and user interaction.

The low-level design includes the data flow design, database design and system internal components design to provide the services of the upper layers of the system.There are many redundant processes of the system. These redundant processes are login process, data reading and writing processes for the attendance performance management system.

The streamlined processes are application coding and testing. These two processes of the design and development require the effort from the team of software development. The testing processes give the bugs of the system. These identified bugs must be removed from the modules of the application to validate the actual functional requirement of the system. Removing or correcting the bugs from the modules requires more team efforts that extends the cost of the system and application development.

The design consideration has the features to upgrade the system or application. The upgradation of the application features is module based. The module of the relevant system is replaced with new one to upgrade the features of the application. The module based design and development is also flexible in upgrading system by changing the logics and procedures of the individual module.