Role Of Systems Analysts/ Designers In Systems Development And Use Case Realisation

1 Have a comprehensive understanding of the role of the systems analyst/ designer, the context in which the systems development activity takes place and the professional standards that are applied to the activity.
2 Apply up to date structured techniques to produce analysis and/or design models for a given case study problem

Use Case Realisation for the ‘Record New Tour’ Use Case

1.1 Analysis Class Diagram: 

As per the software engineering concept, the class diagram is a type of UML or unified modelling language (Lazar, Feng and Hochheiser 2017). The class diagrams represents a static structural diagram which visualizes the framework of a system through visualizing the classes of the operations, attributes and system along with the relationship.

The class diagram can assist in system analysis and design through the following ways.

1. It can visualize the static classifier structure within the proposed system
2. The class diagram can offer fundamental notation regarding similar structural UML diagrams (Ricci, Rokach and Shapira 2015)

• It can facilitate the work of the developers and other project team staff

For creating the class diagram, it is assumed that tour will be of two types. This will be shown through the attribute named city. The tour leader and drivers have been shown through two different classes. The staff type attribute will be used to show staff is self-employed or not. The customer details are stored in the customer class. The scheduling of the coaches and drivers are through the start and end data of the tour.

The Unified Modelling Language or UML communication diagrams are similar to sequence diagram. It is a type of interaction diagram. This diagram visualizes the interaction between the objects of the systems (Koller et al. 2017). This is an extended part of the object diagram which visualizes the system objects along with the system messages which is transferred among the objects.

The advantage of the communication diagram are as following.

1. It can properly show the functionalities of the use case and processes of record new tour (Eckhardt, Vogelsang and Fernandez 2016)
2. The designers can easily catch the interactions among the objects. Understanding the communication between the objects will be very easy

All the classes in the class diagram is visualized as the objects in the proposed communication diagram. The clerical assistance takes the first step to add a tour. Therefore, the clerical assistance is considered as the first object in the diagram. The tour details are stored in the tour object. Therefore, the second object is the tour. Then driver object is used to show driver addition process.

UML sequence diagram is used for visualizing the details of the processes that are carried out. This is a part of UML interaction diagrams (Rahman and Ripon 2014). Like communication diagram, it shows the interaction among the objects within the perspective of collaboration. The focus of the sequence diagram remains upon the time of message transmission to show the interaction order.

The advantages of the sequence diagrams are as following.

1. The sequence diagram will assist in identifying the interface, architectural and logical issues early in the design phase
2. It can be used as a collaboration tool (Ricci, Rokach and Shapira 2015).

• It is effective in documenting the dynamic view of the system design for several levels

To create the sequence diagram each objects are converted into lifelines. Each lifeline can communicate with each other. A database is also considered as a lifeline to show the storing of the data into the database. It is assumed that no loop is used in the sequence diagram. It is because, the clerical assistance selects only a single driver. The customer initializes the application by calling the searchTour() method.  This method is defined in the tour class. After the method is executed, the search result of the available tour is shown to the customer. The customer then select the tour and application initializes the bookTour() method. After tour is confirmed, the driver is assigned to the tour.

The CASE or Computer Aided Software Engineering refers to the collection of various tools that assist in developing and maintaining the software projects. The CASE tools are a set of applications that can allow designing the system along with making the SDLC tasks automatic (Khan et al. 2016). For analysing the case study of the Wide World Tour Management System, the CASE tool was a very significant piece of application. The case tool used for analysis, Enterprise Architect, has many features like structural UML model, behavioural UML model and many more. It was possible to design every possible diagram for the proposed system through the Enterprise Architect only. Through the development of the class diagram, the attributes of the classes and the operations they will perform has been identified (Lazar, Feng and Hochheiser 2017). The case tool provide very easy interaction module which allowed to concentrate more the case study rather than usage of the tool itself.

The Class Diagram and its Benefits in System Analysis and Design

The tool allowed in changing the diagrams even after saving the diagrams. It was not possible to identify all the aspects of the classes at first. After continuously changing the initial diagram, the final class diagram was developed (Khan et al. 2016). The based on the finding of the class diagram, the objects of the classes are identified. The enterprise architect allowed to align the business needs with the technical aspects. The case tool was very assisting in evaluating the UML models. The case tool has been used extensively to show the message passing among the objects (Dabbagh and Lee 2014). The message passing is critical factor system analysis and design as it allow better system understanding and its object communication.

The first benefit that case tool provided in system analysis is that it allowed focusing on the architecture of the system without worrying about the coding. The integration of the requirements of adding a new tour was very easy through the use of the Enterprise Architect (Cengarle, Grönninger and Rumpe 2014). It is more significant to concentrate on the system operations rather than how to use the tool itself. The easy to use interface and great interaction modules has made it possible. The use case diagram provided in the case study allowed understanding of the system behaviour. However, understanding the elements of the system was a difficult task. If the case tool was not supportive then it was not possible to generate the classes and the objects of Wide World Tour Management System (Baumann, Hahn and Hubbuch 2015). The case tool provided a customized approach toward system analysis. It was possible to capture the needs of the data processing so that internal communication among the objects could be identified. Through the case tool, the insight of the business could be recorded into models which resulted in developing the more model.

The UML models have been used for developing both the structural and behavioural models. Perhaps, the biggest advantage of UML model is that it allows the designer to model both the structural and behavioural model of a system. This means that through the UML models only, the designers can analyse and design the internal structure, messages passing through system elements, communication, interface requirements, interaction basics and more. The UML modelling convention has so many models that it can cover almost all the aspects of a large information system. The UML is capable of catching both the static and dynamic aspects of a system. It is very important to create a UML diagram to capture the basic designs of a system through which the other complex models can be created.

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