Week 9

"Week 9 already??" These were the words that popped in my head as I was downloading this week's lecture slides. Plus one extra exclamation mark. But really, the semester’s gone by really quickly! But you know what I realised today? These blog entries really are helpful! In today’s tutorial for instance, we were working on Activity Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams, and I remember us being given an a question on Activity Diagrams before.. in one of the Additional Exercises. A quick skim of my previous entries (and entries of a friend who I distinctly remember working hard on that question) revealed that the Additional Questions were given to us in week 4. And I also remember that the actual lecture slides I was looking for (the first time we were introduced to Activity Diagrams) was one week prior to that :) Lovely isn’t it?

The Sequence Diagrams were even better: ‘Where have I seen those stick figures before...?’ It took only a few scrolls for me to find my enthusiastic comment regarding the colourful diagrams and stick figures from week 6 :) Same thing when I’m trying to work on the assignment.

Move on to today’s lecture.. Another colourful set of slides by the way. But I’m starting to think too many similar diagrams in one lecture is too confusing for me. I mean, I understand that the next few diagrams were only trying to show the different depths or level of detail but still... hang on~ *backtrack* Perhaps I should talk about what the slides were actually about before starting my rant :P

Today’s lecture was entitled: Structured Design. This is about the traditional approach to designing i.e. NOT object-oriented. This refers to methods such as Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) and System Flowcharts. We also learnt about the Automation System Boundary which covers the need for being able to identify the manual and automated processes within the system. This is useful for the creation of modules. Structure Charts are also useful as they are simple, help describe functions and show the relationships between the various modules. There are two approaches to developing a structure chart though: Transaction Analysis or Transform Analysis. Transaction Analysis is more appropriate for upper-level modules that process multiple input or transaction types. Transform Analysis on the other hand uses DFD fragments as inputs and is therefore more appropriate for designing programs that converts inputs to outputs.

We also covered Evaluating the Quality of a Structure Chart: through module coupling (measuring how the modules are connected) or module cohesion (measuring the internal strength of modules i.e. performing one defined task). Lastly, we talked about Pseudocode, a form of module algorithm design, and the Three-layer Design, which consists of the view, business logic and data layers.

Yup, that’s another week’s worth of lecture to be drilled into our brains. The study guide was very short though!! I’m disappointed.. I look forward to those study guides each week! I guess that’s a hint for me to stop neglecting the textbook for additional reading..