Week 8

Again, another fast week..

Sat up front - 5th row - in today’s lecture, and found that it was not a very good idea.. Yup that was the closest I’ve ever sat to the front. Dead centre too! So the gigantic (not to mention seemingly super bright) screen in front of me gave me quite an eye strain. Why didn’t I change seats you ask? Because it’s awkward moving about in the middle of a lecture. But I did plan on doing that during our usual break half-way through the lecture. Only.. today we didn’t have that break.. So I spent most of the lecture with my head down. That’s not to say I wasn’t paying attention of course. Because I was! *angelic smile* :)

If I wasn’t paying attention in class I wouldn’t be able to tell you that today’s lecture revolved around the design stage. We covered the transition between the analysis and design stages and the various activities involved in the design phase. That would be:

• Designing and integrating the network
• Designing the application architecture
• Designing the user interfaces
• Designing the system interfaces
• Designing and integrating the database
• Prototyping for design details
• Designing and integrating the system controls

In short, we learnt that the design phase is not just about actual design but also emphasises on successful integration.

What else.. oh yeah, I also saw a few familiar slides during the lecture! ‘Familiar’ as in, from one of my previous units hehe.. Mr Yeap used a few slides from his old FIT1012 Fundamentals of IS lecture notes regarding system boundaries to illustrate the importance of successful integration. Aww~ seeing that slide made me a bit nostalgic :)

Tutorial .
We worked on use case descriptions. Fully developed descriptions, to be more specific. It was good practice. I’d hate to go straight into an assignment or exam without having much practice on it.

We also found our Assignment 1a results posted on Moodle! Not bad.. We’re told that we’ll get the actual hardcopy with the feedbacks back within a few days.

Aites, that’s it for now I guess. Sigh, I hate how time seems to fly by really quickly these days.. Time to work on Assignment 1b!

Week 7

Wow, week 6 flew by rather quickly didn’t it? Feels like I wrote my last entry just yesterday. . Perhaps due to a busy week. I’m now happy to say that I have said Goodbye to Assignment 1a. Not a teary Goodbye though, I know I’ll see it again soon. Once they’re marked. They always have a way of finding their way back home :)

After reading the CyberRoo memo, listening to the audio (and even typed up a transcript!) and going through the forum, I managed to gather enough information to produce 22 Events. I’ve heard many different numbers though, ranging from 18 to 29. It got me kinda worried.. Did I do enough? Did I do too much? I’ll find out soon enough I guess.

Okayyy.. today’s lecture.

Again, I’d like to say I liked the study guide better than the lecture notes. Yes, I’m finding it odd that I prefer comprehensive black-and-white notes as opposed to colourful but straight-to-the-point ones. This week’s lecture started off with a continuation of last week’s Use Case lecture. We had a brief recap of the what we did then proceeded to the lecture slides on System Sequence Diagrams (SSD), integrating object-oriented models and had a discussion on traditional approaches vs. object-oriented approaches. The second half of the lecture then focused on this week’s topic regarding the final stages of the analysis phase. This includes things like prioritising system requirements, coming up with alternative approaches, being able to evaluate and select the best approach, approaching vendors and creating reports and presenting it to the client. These processes help developers make the transition between gathering and analysing system requirements to the design and development of the system.

*Fast-forward three hours later*

During the tutorial class, we continued to work on last week’s tutorial questions regarding the class diagrams and use case modelling. I actually enjoyed the exercise immensely as it allowed us to get some hands-on experience as opposed to just understanding the theory. My only problem was I kept feeling tempted to adding a crow’s foot to my class diagram. Yes, I’ve had a lot more practice with entity relationship diagrams (ERD) from last year, shows doesn’t it? ;)

Week 6

With all the stuff we have due this week I almost forgot to update this reflective blog! But oddly enough I felt weird not doing it last week over the mid-semester beak. I had half a mind to write a post simply saying hi (that would’ve been fun to read eh!).

Hello, by the way :)

So.. reflection on today’s Systems Analysis and Design classes.. Firstly, my sleepy morning started off with an enjoyable read of the study guide. Another informative one by the way. But it is very useful indeed. Sometimes I find that it makes more sense than the lectures. Particularly today’s lecture about use case diagrams. I think I got more out of the study guide than those colourful diagrams. Maybe it has something to do with being a book-worm.. perhaps that’s why I found the descriptive text easier to understand than the actual pictures (cute stick figures though! :D).

Oh yeah, Mr Yeap used another familiar example today! An example I remember hearing two semesters ago:
“Let’s say Abdur Rehman wants to buy shoes. Sports shoes. Adidas for instance. He could order it through the web, phone or by mail. These are examples of the various scenarios that could take place”.
Although slightly varied, if memory serves me correctly, last year Mr Yeap was using the example to illustrate the Supply Chain Management (SCM). And Abdur Rehman was buying Nike shoes (Happy birthday to Abdur Rehman by the way! :D).

In tutorial class.. Mr Yeap taught the class for the first hour to go through the Additional Tutorial Exercise regarding context diagrams and levelled DFDs. The exercise also included a question on event table but sadly we didn’t have time to go through it. DFDs worry me, because there’s usually more than one way to do the task so I’m always uncertain of whether what I’m doing is right or not..