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INFS7007 – Intelligent Business Analysis

Major Assignment

Introduction

This assignment is an individual, not a group assignment. It requires you to develop an information system model for a system of your own choice. The aim is to get you to apply many of the system analysis and modelling techniques discussed and illustrated in classes to a real, or at least realistic, case of non-trivial but still reasonable and do-able complexity. All questions regarding the assessment requirements should be directed to the course convenor – no one else can speak authoritatively about assessment expectations.

Choosing your system

As stated in the Introduction, the choice of which system to analyse and model is up to you. However, here are some rough guidelines to assist you in your choice:

1 Try to choose a system for an area or application about which you know a considerable amount or about which you are in a position to find out what you need to know. Examples might be a system related to your current work (if you are presently employed) or previous work experience, a hobby or interest that you have, or perhaps a system that you or a colleague or friend needs. Experience from earlier versions of this course shows unambiguously that this assignment will work best (and you will learn the most from it) if you choose to analyse and develop a model for a system that relates to the “real” world in some way, rather than one that is completely fictional and invented entirely “within your own head”.

2 Try to choose a system of a reasonable size and level of complexity. This will probably be hard to judge initially, but it is generally better to choose a system that is more likely to turn out to be too big or complex rather than one that may turn out to be too small or simple. The reason for this is that, if your choice does turn out to be too big or complex, you can always reduce the scope of your intended system or choose to model only part of it. On the other hand, if your choice turns out to be too simple and small to form a useful assignment exercise, it is generally harder to expand it to make it more suitable as a worthwhile learning experience as well as the basis for an acceptable assignment submission. Although we won’t discuss these metrics until mid-way through the course (so they will be less useful to you at the beginning), one useful indicator of size and complexity of a project is the number of entities in its data model. If this turns out to be somewhere around 6-8 for your project then you probably have a suitably sized system for this assignment, although these numbers should definitely not be treated as hard limits. However, if the number of entities in your data model is significantly fewer than 6 then the model is probably too small and simple to be a useful learning exercise; and if it is many more than 8 then it is probably starting to get too large to feasibly tackle. Another indicator is the number of levels you find yourself going down to in your DFD hierarchy. If this is more than two for the first few processes you decompose, and there are more than about seven processes on your level 0 diagram, then your chosen system is highly likely to be too big and you may have to reduce its scope or simply leave parts of the model incomplete.

Your tasks and deliverables

Your first assignment deliverable is a mid-project progress report. This is to be provided digitally via Wattle and carries a weighting of 15% of the total project mark. In fact, calling this deliverable a “progress report” is somewhat misleading since it is not to be a formal report describing what progress you have made to date but is rather to show what progress you have made by providing all of the (no doubt unfinished, incomplete, draft and still developing) analysis work that you have done on the project so far. What you provide here will form the basis on which you will build the relevant sections of your final assignment deliverable (see below). This deliverable is due no later than the end of week 7 of semester Ideally this should be your final choice of system - if you haven’t finalised your choice before the mid-semester break, arrange time to discuss with the  course convenor. Suggested page length is whatever you have completed up to that point in time.

The due date for the third and final assignment deliverable is the end of the first week of exams. Suggested page length is 50 pages (but shorter… or longer…. may also be suitable).

Other Remarks

If you have difficulty in deciding what would be an appropriate system to model, or are having other trouble deciding what to do, please discuss it with me (the course convenor) before you set out too far in your work.

There is NO recommended page/word length, or limit. Make the report easy to read by carefully thinking about the structure and flow. Don’t leave this until 1-2 weeks before it is due – make some progress each week and take what you learnt to improve the report over the duration of the semester.

You may use an appropriate CASE tool to assist you in your work, in fact, it is STRONGLY recommended if you can obtain or have access to one, but it is not essential for the purposes of this assignment. As the work needs to be submitted digitally via Wattle uploaded, any hand-drawn materials will need to be scanned and included in your assignment upload file (Word document or PDF).

When incorporating images into your Word document use the ‘insert’ function rather than ‘copy and paste’ as this will minimize your file size. Wattle has a maximum upload size of 40MB.