Case Study Project - Student Registration System

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Case Study Project - Student Registration System

MPTM 700 – SYSTEMS REQUIREMENTS & ANALYSIS

BY

Judd Nicholson, Elease Houston, and Mohammad Sajid

May 5, 2014

Table of Contents

1        Executive Summary        

2        Scope        

3        Constraints        

4        Requirements Elicitation        

5        Functional Requirements        

6        Non-Functional Requirements        

7        Addendums        

1. Executive Summary

The single, integrated Banner information system (MyAccess) now supports undergraduate, graduate and medical admission, financial aid, student billing and all aspects of records and registration, including the course catalogue, scheduling, transcripts, registration, and academic history. Students and faculty have online, 24x7 access to academic and personal information and academic administrative offices can rely on an integrated database for analysis and reporting.

The goal of this project is to enhance the registration process through My Access to be more user friendly, and more personal by improving and customizing the search functionality.  The enhanced search capability is called “Profile Preferences” and will display information collected about the student’s profile that is already part of the system and then provided students the ability to customize their profile by including additional specific information about the their program. The user will be able to identify the specific program they have been accepted to as their course of study as well as identify the elective courses they are interested in.  This information will be used by the system during search to improve the relevancy of the return results and improve the user experience.  

1. Scope
   

The scope of this project includes developing a software module that provides a Profile Preferences option to users.  This module will be integrated with the existing system; for example, online student account, Search and Register for classes. Georgetown University and stakeholders have agreed to use agile methodology for this project.  

Georgetown University already have an online registration system that serves all of their students and programs, but they feel like there is a need for improvement and enhancement can be done to make the registration process more user friendly and tailored to each student using the system.

We are recommending that we go with an agile system development life cycle methodology to meet the client’s needs. They are committed to upgrade the system and want to be involved throughout the process.  

1. Constraints
   

Constraints for the Georgetown Student Registration system are related to the challenges of integrating with the current online registration system. The UI design of the system must be consistent with the current online registration system.  The implementation of the Profile aware module must be implemented with technologies compatible with the current online registration system in an effort to ease integration.

1. Requirements Elicitation
   

 Requirement elicitation is an important process and the methodology used must be logical and thorough. Mistakes made during the elicitation process are a major cause for a project to fail and directly increases the cost associated to fix the mistakes. Conducting adequate studies before and during the elicitation process helps to minimize and prevent errors.  It is important to use the correct elicitation techniques to gather business and technical requirements from stakeholders, feedback from end users, and understanding of the existing system. The information gathered is only useful if it properly identifies the scope and specific needs and enhancement needed by the users.  Elicitation techniques used will be Interviews, User Interface Analysis, and Questionnaires/Surveys.

Interviews: Interview is one of the most popular elicitation techniques used to gather requirements. One on One interview gives business analyst an opportunity to discuss in depth with the stakeholder and get their perspective and thoughts on the scope and business need for the project. This also allows the business analyst to discuss feasibility of possible solutions and expectations.

The following interviewing guidelines should be used:

1. Interview should begin with stakeholders and participants that have complete understanding of the processes and system functionality.
2. The goal of the interview should be to understand the beginning and the goal of the system upon completion of the project.
3. During the interview a rapport should be established with the client early in the process to build trust and effective communication.
4. Natural language related to project should be used so that both the client and project team understand.
5. The interviewer will ensure questions posed to customer team are unbiased. The Product team is not to make any assumptions.
6. Focus should be on requirements gathering and not solving the problem at this stage.
7. Getting specific details from the client regarding the functionality and enhancement that is needed.
8. Ineffective requirements elicitation causes problems throughout the rest of the SLDC process and is one of the major reasons why projects fail.

UI Analysis: Interface analysis is used to analyze the way users interact with the system and modules. According to BABOK, thorough interface analysis will describe the purpose of each functionality and provide high level details and outline scenarios. Georgetown University Online Registration system interacts with other applications within the Georgetown domain like billing, registration and applications specific to schools that are within Georgetown. Interface analysis is essential when doing an enhancement on a system that interacts with other applications to understand the impact and the user interaction with the system.