SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

System analysis and design



System analysis and design

Introduction

Software development project is a structured procedure involved of various activity frameworks. A number of inter-linked processes are involved which are collectively called Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are a number of various methodologies and processes that are used as per needs, customer requirements, available resources, and timeline of project.

The different phases of a software development project are Requirement Engineering; Design and Development; Implementation and Deployment; Validation and Verification; and Maintenance.

The methodologies of software development projects are known as process models, software models, or SDLC models. These process models include Waterfall model, Prototyping model, Incremental model, Rapid Application Development (RAD) model, agile model, and Extreme Programming (XP) model.

Before you start with your very first project of software development, you must acquire in-depth information of stakeholders, system functions, requirements of the software, quality targets, budgeting, maintenance requirements, etc.

The most important phase of software development project is the Requirement gathering and requirement analysis. This phase will need you to capture all the functional specifications of the product. The requirement engineering process determines all the deliverable specifications of the product, including from the design goals and functionalities to the performance and quality measures. Since you are the client liaison for this project, the requirement-gathering phase is of core significance for you. You will need to involve end-users, business owners, software engineers, customers, domain experts, competitors and all stakeholders throughout the software development process. The success measure of the software development project is highly based on the requirement gathering process. You can perform the requirement gathering activities using the following techniques: brainstorming; analysis of the document; interview with the clients; observations; and surveys.

Being a client liaison, you will need to consult with client to acquire and knowledge involving to their business processes, scope, feasibility and scalability of the intended software. Then it is recommended for you to formalize a detailed list of the customer requirements which may enable the development team to build a vision and scope for the intended software. The customer requirement document outlines the features and an overall schedule for the deployment and implementation of the project.

The requirement-engineering phase comprises of three main processes: requirement gathering, requirement analysis, and documentation of the requirements. Requirement gathering comprises of identifying and collecting the requirements. Requirement analysis process encompasses examining and verifying whether the stated and identified requirements are adequate enough or not. It includes the measure of clarity, completeness, consistency and unambiguousness of the requirements of the software. The documentation phase includes the formulation of a number of documents of use-case diagrams (UML diagrams), SRS (Software Requirements Specifications), and user stories.

You will be required to precisely draft the comprehensive system architecture prior to the software development phase. This will make certain that both you and you clients have settled on the system functions, technical specifications, budget and time frame for the project. This will be a very robust approach in software development project.

After the successful accomplishment of requirement gathering phase, you will ...