Requirements Analysis For A Mexican Food Outlet Essay.

Group 1 – Target Customers: Kids, Adults and Senior Citizens

1. For the requirements analysis you will need to talk to people.  Please detail five groups of people you will talk to about requirements and justify your answer? 

2. Explain what methods you might use to discover the requirements for this system. 

3. Provide a 750 word summary answering the question; what is scalability and why is it an important factor to consider when making recommendations to the franchise?

The report has been prepared for a Mexican food outlet that is looking to start business on the Sunshine coast. It would be working under the franchise arrangement and would be expanding to several stores in various locations on the Sunshine coast. The stores would be required to be linked with each other for inventory management and order processing along with the setting up of wireless access points. The report covers the details on the requirements analysis for the business along with some significant details associated with system analysis and design.

The questions that will be asked and recorded from this group are as listed below.

• What do you expect from food outlets in terms of order processing and food delivery?
• What are the sources from which you get to know about a new restaurant in the area?
• Do you prefer visiting the food outlet or getting it delivered at home?
• What are the must-have items for you on a Mexican food restaurant menu?
• How do you like the payments to be processed?

The group is the customers that would be using the restaurant the food outlet and it would be necessary to understand the expectations of the customers from the sections such as menu, payment processes, food delivery and order processing. The group will include the people from all the age groups.

The questions that will be asked and recorded from this group are as listed below.

• What is the budget estimate for the project?
• What are the costs that can be avoided?
• What are the financial risks associated with the project?
• What are the necessary formalities and approvals from the financial and funding perspective?

The feedback from the group would be essential to design a strong budget for the project along with accurate estimate of costs and analysis of associated risks.

The questions that will be asked and recorded from this group are as listed below.

• What systems do you use for inventory management?
• What systems do you use for order processing?
• What tools and equipments do you use?
• How did you market your hotel/restaurant?
• How do manage the hotel/restaurant staff?

The feedback from the group would be essential to design stronger systems for the overall management of the food outlet.

The questions that will be asked and recorded from this group are as listed below.

• How shall the wireless access points be set up?
• What are the wireless communication systems that shall be followed in the food outlet?

The feedback from the group will be essential to set up strong network and access points to integrate several systems and business units together.

The questions that will be asked and recorded from this group are as listed below.

• What role would marketing activities play in this project and set up?
• What forms of marketing shall be used for the marketing and advertising of the food outlet?

The feedback from the group will be essential to correctly market the food outlet. 

2. After operational needs are assessed and the concept of operations (CONOPS) and high-level concept definition are completed, the next step—and typically the first task on development projects—is to discover, elicit, collect, define, and analyze requirements. Requirements cover various aspects of a capability or system—user needs, behavioral, quality, implementation, etc. Requirements must be consolidated from many sources, including but not limited to experienced and new users, other stakeholders, SMEs, managers, and, if necessary, the users' customers. Operational users are key contributors because they provide some or all requirements for the system's functional and performance capabilities and user interface (Lutz, 2016).

Group 2 – Financial Advisors

The analysts can discover requirements through the use of Questionnaires that is a special-purpose document that allows the analyst to collect information and opinions from respondents. Another method is Interviews which is a fact-finding technique whereby the systems analysts collect information from individuals through face-to-face interaction. Joint Requirements Planning (JRP) is a process whereby highly structured group meetings are conducted for the purpose of analyzing problems and defining requirements. Discovery Prototyping is the act of building a small-scale, representative or working model of the users’ requirements in order to discover or verify those requirements. Brainstorming is a technique for generating ideas by encouraging participants to offer as many ideas as possible in a short period of time without any analysis until all the ideas have been exhausted. Sampling is the process of collecting a representative sample of documents, forms, and records (Iusb, 2016).

3. Scalability is the ability to handle increased workload by repeatedly applying a cost effective strategy for extending a system’s capacity (Weinstock and Goodenough, 2006). In other words, scalability refers to the ability of a system to give reasonable performance under growing demands (rising traffic or increased data volume). Not only is a scalable system assured to perform well under increasing load, it would also reduce the need of having to redesign the system under such challenges, and this translates to business gains such as the mitigation of possible financial loss or decreased customer confidence. Scalability is one of the most valuable quality attributes of a system. Scaling up or vertical scaling refers to resource maximization of a single unit to expand its ability to handle increasing load. In hardware terms, this includes adding processing power and memory to the physical machine running the server. In software terms, scaling up may include optimizing algorithms and application code. Optimization of hardware resources, such as parallelizing or having optimized number of running processes is also considered techniques of scaling up. Scaling out or horizontal scaling refers to resource increment by the addition of units to the system. This means adding more units of smaller capacity instead of adding a single unit of larger capacity. The requests for resources are then spread across multiple units thus reducing the excess load on a single machine (Khare, 2016).

The Mexican food outlet that is supposed to be opened on Sunshine Coast aims to work under a franchise arrangement for the other future stores. Hence the business will expand, and the resources that are associated with the business need to expand too. As per the requirement of investor, each outlet should be interconnected to ease the ordering and inventory management. The outlets should have wireless access points to ensure internet connectivity be provided to the customers. The project will start with a single outlet on the beach which will act as the base for all the other outlets. Hence the system should be designed in such a way that any amount of expansion doesn’t affect the system that has been installed at this point. Hence the scalability becomes a pivotal factor for implementation of the franchise.

Group 3 – Hotel and Restaurant Managers

As the business would develop from a solitary outlet to numerous outlets, the fundamental goal of taking care of the requests of the buyers would be to stay steady, yet the heap in this way would increment. Since the market requests are variable, and the essence of the shopper would change with time and as indicated by the accessibility of assets, the administration supplier ought to dependably be a stage ahead to meet the requests. The scalability of the system would therefore get to be vital as it would give the calculation control required for the extending organizations. The growing business would give more customers and the same would lead to more information that would be required to be dealt with in due time to offer better administrations (DaSilva et al. 2013). Additionally, the web access to buyers will feel the brunt in the case if lesser capacity would be introduced, and more clients turn up in the meantime. Thus repetition of the assets ought to be given the due significance. Aside from the web benefits, the request arrangement and stock management will likewise get to be intricate with the expanding measure of outlets, for the management of the same, PCs with interconnection must be given to decrease the multifaceted nature of dealing with the assets. For interconnection switches or centers ought to be introduced that is fit for pleasing every one of the frameworks that are introduced in the system. So it can be comprehended that the scalability ought to be remembered for an extending the framework (Wang et al. 2014).

Henceforth it can be seen that establishment has a particular prerequisite, it is made to develop into a framework that is spread over a region. Since the necessity of the framework is constantly obscure and the development is unusual, some repetition is constantly useful, and scalability offers that additional mile to the association that would surely aide in better management of the framework (Jab?onski 2016).

Conclusion

There are five major groups that will be contacted for discovery and gathering of requirements as the customers, financial advisors, hotel and restaurant managers, network administrators and market analysts. The requirements will be gathered through various processes such as questionnaires, brainstorming, discovery prototyping and many others. Scalability is the ability to handle increased workload by repeatedly applying a cost effective strategy for extending a system’s capacity and the same would play a significant role in this case.

References

DaSilva, C.M., Trkman, P., Desouza, K. and Lindi?, J., 2013. Disruptive technologies: a business model perspective on cloud computing. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 25(10), pp.1161-1173.

Iusb, (2016). Requirements Discovery. [online] Available at: https://www.cs.iusb.edu/~hhakimza/C308/chap006.pdf [Accessed 15 Nov. 2016].

Jab?o?ski, A., 2016. Scalability of Sustainable Business Models in Hybrid Organizations. Sustainability, 8(3), p.194.

Khare, A. (2016). Scalability. [online] Available at: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~seer/book/2e/Ch06.%20Scalability.pdf [Accessed 15 Nov. 2016].

Lutz, R. (2016). Ongoing Requirements Discovery in High-Integrity Systems. [online] Available at: https://web.cs.iastate.edu/~rlutz/publications/ieee-software04.pdf [Accessed 15 Nov. 2016].

Wang, C., Liu, X., Song, Y. and Han, J., 2014.Scalable and robust construction of topical hierarchies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.3460.

Weinstock, C. and Goodenough, J. (2006). On System Scalability. [online] Available at: https://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/06tn012.pdf [Accessed 15 Nov. 2016].