Online Accommodation Booking System For Work Travelers Essay.

This assignment assesses the following Unit Learning Outcomes; ; students should be able to demonstrate their achievements in them:
a.Determine system requirements through requirements elicitation and workshops.
b. Design processes for verification and validation of system requirements.
c. Use appropriate modelling techniques to specify system requirements.
d. Produce and communicate to others the functional specifications of a system.
f. Produce a system implementation, and design and implement integration and testing plans.
g. Investigate state of the art software engineering techniques and technologies, and their scope of applicability for Software Engineering.

Use cases

Many companies offer various incentives to their employees in order to increase job satisfaction and therefore increase productivity. This is because happy employees are more productive than demotivated and unhappy workers. As a result, some companies offer working holiday program where workers are allowed to travel and work in cities of their choice across the world. Australia has become one of the most favorite destinations for such work travel arrangements. With such kind of an arrangement, accommodation becomes a very critical area for the employees in transit. As a result, there is the necessity to implement a system that can ease that process.

Online Accommodation Booking System can therefore be used by the travelling employees to acquire accommodation services and even pay for the same. The youth can also be able to cancel the bookings before due date as well as rate the accommodation service offered by the host. This rating allows better utilization of the services by maximizing the use of the best provider[1]. The client can also be able to communicate with the administrators of the site through messaging system on the site. The admin can also be able to cancel a booking while the host can be able to withdraw his/her service upon a two weeks’ notice. The admin can also be able to reject the hosts’ action. This system is modeled to support the activities of an accommodation service such as Airbnb or other such models. Therefore, our group was chosen to develop this system.

Use cases help understand the various interactions taking place between the external actors and the system [2] [3]. These scenarios are then modeled into use case diagrams and use case descriptions. The various actors are the entities defined within the system boundaries. From the users interaction with the system, there exists various use cases that can be deduced from the system. The main actors OABS system are the Youth, the system administrator (admin) and the host. Activities include registration, booking, payment, canceling a booking and rating the service.

Figure 2. Use Case description

The host class is the main class used in the relationship. The classes involved are Facility, Accommodation and Reservation. Each host has a Facility. A host can have several facilities. Additionally a host has a reservation and an accommodation. Conversely, each facility must have a Host. Similarly, each Reservation and Accommodation must have a Host. The relationship between the host and the Facility, Accommodation and Reservation is that of one-to-many. Accommodation and Reservation are also related. An accommodation fulfills a Reservation. As such, you must have a Reservation in order to have an accommodation.

This case involves the youth making a booking into the system. For this to succeed, the youth needs to list the available accommodations. Additionally, the youth needs to successfully make a payment through the system. The full use case description is presented below.

Figure 4. Youth's Use case description

State transition diagram describes a state in which an object can have through the transaction process [4]. In the event of a youth making a reservation to gain accommodation during the work holiday programme, the youth can either be logged into the system, booked or reserved a room, rejected or accommodated. If the youth is rejected, he/she will search for other hosts and place reservations. If the request is neither accepted nor decline, the youth will remain booked and in waiting state. Otherwise, the youth will either be accommodated or rejected. The state transition diagram shown illustrates this situation. 

Use Case 001

In this model, Reservation is the main entity. A Reservation must have a group or a traveller. None of them are mandatory but either one of them must exist. Additionally, each reservation must have at least one payment. It can have several payment as the relationship is one-to-many relationship. Each Reservation must have one Host and the relationship is one-to-one relationship. Also, a reservation has an accommodation associated with it.

The process of adding a new host involves adding personal details of the host and activation of the Host so that they can start operating within the system. During adding the details, the system validates that all the required information is entered. Additionally, the system check whether the Host is already been added earlier. This is to avoid duplication of data.

Activity diagrams help represent the activity flow from one task to another as the user accomplishes a certain task through the system[5] . It also helps define some key decisions that need to be made through the activity. For the admin to be able to add a new host, he/she needs to be logged into the system. He/she enters the details and the system checks whether the required details are available and they are valid. It also checks whether the user host already exists in the system before trying to add them

Validating system requirements can be problematic because of the complexity and intertwining of actual product specification and abstract specifications[6] . However, prototyping helps reduce this complexity by integrating both into one idea that can be easily understood. A prototype is the visual representation of an idea under development [7]. This activity is very important especially in verifying the design and therefore assessing user acceptance [8]. The activity also allows involvement of all the stakeholders in the software development cycle including the end users [9].  Identifying missing functionalities becomes easy as well as identifying areas that need modification. Prototyping tools allow developers to be able to develop a prototype quickly hence avoid delays in requirements verification.

There exists a lot of prototyping tools that can be used for the same reason. However, Webflow offers some of the best functionalities required for prototyping web based systems. This is because it has a nice user interface and is easy to use. It also has a free license thus it can be used even in tight budget constraints.

One reason why Webflow is able to achieve requirements verification is due to its powerful wireframe generating functionality. The developer is able to create very visually appealing wireframes in a very short time therefore offer a very vivid picture of how the system would look like. Thus it helps the user to validate the design of the system. Webflow offers requirements verification by ensuring that the product is being built in the right way. It also helps elicit new requirements which would finally lead to the development of the system that the user needs. This helps increase user acceptance. This is because the clients are able to gain a clearer understanding of the system being developed and feel that they have contributed to the final design [10]. Webflow allows to map design models to UI prototype design and therefore allow the client to be able to link the formal specification to the system under design. The prototyping tool is also able to create user interactions to mimic the user interactions with the system. This can be in form of clicks, selections and even general animations. Finally, Webflow is able to allow developers to export their prototypes into actual code and start developing. Thus is helps in reducing the development time and therefore increase user acceptance. 

References

[1] H. Zhang, I. Ganchev, N. S. Nikolov, Z. Ji, and M. O’droma, “A hybrid service recommendation prototype adapted for the UCWW: A smart-city orientation,” Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput., vol. 2017, 2017.

[2] “UML Use Case Diagrams: Tips.” [Online]. Available: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/90-754/umlucdfaq.html. [Accessed: 21-May-2018].

[3] I. Jacobson, Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach. Redwood City, CA, USA: Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 2004.

[4] “State Transition Diagrams.” [Online]. Available: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/145/CRC/state.html.

[5] University of Northern Carolina, “Activity Diagrams.” [Online]. Available: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/145/CRC/Activity.html.

[6] K. Exner, K. Lindow, C. Buchholz, and R. Stark, “Validation of Product-Service Systems - A prototyping approach,” Procedia CIRP, vol. 16, pp. 68–73, 2014.

[7] B. Matthews and S. Wensveen, Prototypes and prototyping in design research. 2015.

[8] P. Weichbroth and M. Sikorski, User Interface Prototyping. Techniques, Methods and Tools, vol. 234. 2015.

[9] M. Beaudouin-Lafon and W. Mackay, Prototyping Tools and Techniques. 2009.

[10] M. Kamalrudin and J. Grundy, “Generating essential user interface prototypes to validate requirements,” 2011 26th IEEE/ACM Int. Conf. Autom. Softw. Eng. ASE 2011, Proc., no. c, pp. 564–567, 2011.