Functional And Non-Functional Requirements And Use Case Diagram For Online University Enrollment System

In response to the issues raised in the ‘online university enrolment system’ case study provided, identify the functional and non-functional requirement for an online enrolment system and build and document a set of use cases for that system.

Requirement analysis techniques and skills are of fundamental importance to a Business Analyst, who is often required to help business users in terms of identifying what they really need in their new systems. This assessment allows you to enhance your requirement analysis techniques and skills by capturing the business requirement of a system, identify “what” the proposed system will do, “how” the system will perform those tasks, and communicate the identified requirement through a set of use case diagrams and their associated documentations.

Question 1.

(a) Who are the stakeholders in this project? Please list at least four stakeholders.
(b) Who are the Actors in this System? Please list at least four actors

Question 2.

Identify and list at least TEN (10) major functional requirements for the System.

Question 3.

Using your own experience with similar online student enrolment systems and the information provided in the case study, identify and list at least FIVE (5) non-functional requirements for the System. Explain and justify each non-functional requirement.
Question 4.

Using your own experience with similar online student enrolment systems and the information provided in the case study, build a comprehensive set of use case diagrams for the System using MS Visio.

Please note that the case study has not and does not intend to provide a comprehensive description of requirements for the System. This means that you are required to use your own experience with information systems in general and online student enrolment systems in particular to develop this set of use case diagrams. For example, would Student Enrolment Officers be required to log into the System before performing any tasks?

(a). Stakeholders are an important part of any project or an organization and they are largely influenced by the outcome of the project. The stakeholders linked with the development of the online student enrolment system at ABC University are indicated as follows-

1. ABC University
2. The Pro Vice Chancellor
3. Program Directors
4. Student Enrollment Officers

The above four stakeholders are the key stakeholders for the project of developing the online student enrolment system for ABC University.  

(b). An actor of a system specifies the role that can be played by a specific user or any specific system that is in charge of interacting with the subject. The actors identified for the online student enrolment system of ABC University are indicated as follows-

1. Student
2. Timetabling Officers
3. Student Enrolment Officers
4. Program Directors

The above four individual are four important actors of the system that is being proposed.

The functional requirements of a system is mainly used for accurately defining the major functionality of a system or its subsystem (Dennis, Wixom & Roth, 2018). The main functional requirements of the student enrollment system at ABC University are indicated as follows-

1. Creation of courses and Subject Electives for each courses:The program director is in charge of creation of the courses in which the student will be able to enroll (Dennis, Wixom & Tegarden, 2015). The system that is to be developed should include the option of creation of the subject electives for each courses so that the student can choose from the electives.
2. Editing courses and subject electivesis another functional requirement that is linked with online enrollment of a student. This option is considered to be an important functional requirement as with this particular option, the admin will have the control on the courses and the subjects that are offered to the students.
3. Removing courses and subject electivesis a functional requirement as well and this feature is controlled by the admin (Pykhtin, Klevtsova, Ovchinkin & Zeveleva, 2015). This is an important functional requirement to have a control on the subjects and the courses in which students can enroll themselves.
4. Creation of Timetables:The timetabling officers should be able to create, edit and removal of the timetables for the each subject that is being offered to have a control on the class timings (Sutton, 2016). Earlier, this was done manually and therefore, this functionality is needed to be incorporated in the online system.
5. Log in:A student, who wishes to enroll himself/herself in a course should be able to log into the enrollment system and it is one significant functional requirements. Without logging into the system, a student cannot enroll themselves into any course.
6. Generation of Customized Timetable:The system should be able to generate customized timetable for the individuals after a student successfully enrolls himself/herself in the University. This is one important functional requirement of the system (Ahern & Burgazzoli Jr, 2017). On basis of the courses that are chosen by the students, customized timetables are needed to be generated so that the students get an idea of the timings of their classes.
7. Sending Email Reminders:The online student registration system should be able to send email reminders to the students who might not have completed their enrollment process
8. Generation of Reports:The system that is to be designed should be able generated customized reports as per the requirements of student enrolment officer and program directors (Rodriguez, 2014). The reports generated will help the enrolment officers and the program directors to get an idea of the students enrolled in each semester.
9. The system should be able to collect the payment from the student through a secure gateway and therefore, security of a systemis a main functional requirement.
10. Detection of timetable clashesis another main functional requirement of the system that will prevent students from taking up of the courses whose timeline will clash. The system should be designed in such a manner so that it is able to detect any timetable clashes that a student might face while registering into a course or a particular subject.

The above listed points indicate the main functional requirements of the proposed University Enrollment system. The system that is to be developed should include all these functionality so that the main objective of developing the online student enrolment system at ABC University is fulfilled. The above mentioned functionalities are considered to be the functional requirement of the system mostly because the above mentioned functionalities will help in management of the entire student enrollment process in an effortless manner.

The non-functional requirements of a system mainly specifies the criteria used for judging the functionality of a system. The main difference between the functional and non-functional requirement of any system of software is that it is a necessity to incorporate all the functional requirements of a system, while the non-functional requirements might be incorporated into a system to enhance the performance of the system. The non-functional requirements of the online student enrolment system are indicated as follows-

1. Improved Response time is a non-functional requirement that the proposed online enrolment system should consider. The improvement of the response time is related to the performance of the system (Jihad, 2018). This non-functional requirement is proposed mainly because a lesser response time will improve the performance of the system.
2. Improved scalability is another non-functional requirement of the proposed student enrolment system (Ongy, 2016). It will improve the system’s performance.
3. Increased accessibility is another proposed non-functional requirement of the student enrollment system (Zhenglong, Yanxia & Wenfeng, 2014). The proposed system should be effective enough to be accessed from all devices such as computer, notebook and smartphone.
4. Recoverability is another non-functional requirement that can be included in a system. The improved recoverability indicates that the data stored in the system can be easily recovered after a disaster.
5. Improved throughput of the system is another non-functional requirement that is proposed. This will improve the performance of the system that is proposed and therefore this non-functional requirement can be incorporated into a system.

The above five points indicate the five main non-functional requirements that can be included in developing the online enrolment system for ABC University. The incorporation of all these main functional requirements of the system will help in improvement of the performance of the system. The performance improvement in the proposed system is necessary as the system will be used by thousands of students for the enrollment process.

The online enrollment system that is proposed involves a number of functionalities and therefore, three comprehensive sets of use case diagrams are prepared for illustrating the main functionalities of the system. A use case diagram is generally prepared for providing a graphic depiction of the process in which the different elements of the system interacts with one another (Reggio, Leotta, Ricca & Clerissi, 2014). The key components of the use case diagram include the boundaries of the system, the actors and the specific roles that are played by each of the actors of the system (Khurana, Chhillar & Chhillar, 2016). The use case diagrams that prepared to illustrate the interaction of the online student Enrolment system of ABC University are indicated as follows-

Functional Requirements

Figure 1: Illustrating the internal Process-Creation of Courses

The use case diagram that is depicted in figure 1, mainly indicates the work of the student enrollment officer in creation of the courses and subjects that will be opted by the students during the enrollment process. The above Use case diagram illustrates the interaction of student enrolment officer with the system that is being developed.

Figure 2: Illustrating the use case for Online Enrollment Process

The above figure illustrates the interaction that the student will have with the system. This is the main use case diagram of the system that illustrates the main activities that the student and the system administrator will perform and their interaction with the system.

Figure 3: Illustrating the use case for Online Enrollment

The above figure indicates that work processes and the interaction of the admin with the system. The use case diagram indicate the works of the student enrolment officers, timetabling officers and the program directors in preparing the system in such a way that it guides the student in enrolling themselves in the University.

The comprehensive set of the above use cases provides an idea of the main works processes of the proposed online enrollment system for ABC University. The interaction of each of the actors with the system as depicted in the comprehensive set of the use case diagrams prepared provides an idea of the main functionality of the proposed online enrollment system.

 Table 1: Use case description for “Enrolls Himself Herself”

 Table 2: Use case description for “Generates Custom Timetables”

The above two tables documents the two elaborate use cases from the generated use case diagrams for online enrolment system for ABC University.

References 

Ahern, T. C., & Burgazzoli Jr, J. (2017). Enrollment Management Strategies for Online Learning Environments. In Handbook of Research on Technology-Centric Strategies for Higher Education Administration (pp. 17-36). IGI Global.

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H., & Roth, R. M. (2018). Systems analysis and design. John wiley & sons.

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H., & Tegarden, D. (2015). Systems analysis and design: An object-oriented approach with UML. John wiley & sons.

Jihad, K. H. (2018). Automatic Enrollment System for Student Dormitory. kirkuk university journal for scientific studies, 13(2), 68-81.

Khurana, N., Chhillar, R. S., & Chhillar, U. (2016). A Novel Technique for Generation and Optimization of Test Cases Using Use Case, Sequence, Activity Diagram and Genetic Algorithm. JSW, 11(3), 242-250.

Ongy, E. E. (2016). Analysis of College Enrollment System Using Six-Sigma (DMAIC) Methodology. Journal of Educational and Human Resource Development, 4, 133-149.

Pykhtin, A., Klevtsova, M., Ovchinkin, O., & Zeveleva, I. (2015). The concept of innovative system of enrollment in state universities of Russia. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6(5), 149.

Reggio, G., Leotta, M., Ricca, F., & Clerissi, D. (2014, January). What are the used UML diagram constructs? A document and tool analysis study covering activity and use case diagrams. In International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (pp. 66-83). Springer, Cham.

Rodriguez, L. F. (2014). Users Acceptance of Online Enrollment Processes in a Higher Education Institution.

Sutton, H. (2016). Build an online hub around student enrollment needs for increased retention, completion. Enrollment Management Report, 20(3), 6-7.

Zhenglong, S., Yanxia, L., & Wenfeng, Z. (2014). Design and Implementation of a New Generation of Service-Oriented Graduate Enrollment System. In Frontier and Future Development of Information Technology in Medicine and Education (pp. 2987-2993). Springer, Dordrecht.