Introduction: Ice Breaker 1. What is your job title and organization? 2. What are you really good at? 3. What is your biggest personal accomplishment thus far? 4. What is your primary expectation for this class? 5. What is your guilty pleasure (i.e., something that makes you please although you may feel guilty about it)?

S556 SYSTEMS ANALYSIS & DESIGN Week 1

Exploring Requirements (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  5 teams were given the same requirement for a computer program except for a single sentence:  Team A: complete the job with the fewest possible hours of programming  Team B: minimize the number of program statements written  Team C: minimize the amount of memory used  Team D: produce the clearest possible program  Team E: to produce the clearest possible output

Exploring Requirements (Gause & Weinberg, 1989) Primary ObjectiveBest Team Minimize core storageC Maximize output readability E Maximize program readability D Minimize statementsB, C Minimize programming hours A

Exploring Requirements (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  If you tell what you want, you’re quite likely to get it  Simple, but difficult task!

Boehm’s Observations on Project Cost AnalysisDesignDevelopmentImplementation Cost Low cost High cost

Primary Concepts in SA&D  Understand organizational issues  Understand the users  Understand the problems

Understand Organizational Issues  Do not jump into the development stage when asked to build an information system  e.g., Social Networking Site  Analyze organizational issues  e.g., culture, organizational structures

Understand the Users  Contextual design: gathering data, data- driven design, the management team, and organizational context

Understand the Problems  Once an information system would be a solution, analyze what kind of system they would need  Define the problems in organizations (assignment #1)  Avoid ambiguity in stating requirements

Understand Design Representations (Saddler, 2001)  A “design” lives only in our heads and in our representations until it’s became in its final form, such as software, hardware, print, or another medium

Understand Design Representations (Saddler, 2001)  If you have an idea about a design of a next new smartphone, what’s the appropriate form of representation for that idea?

Understand Design Representations (Saddler, 2001)  Representational form:  Conversations  Proposals and plans  Sketches  Symbolic and schematic  Scenarios and storyboards  Prototypes

Understand Design Representations (Saddler, 2001)  Roles that representations play:  Specification  Making ideas and intentions tangible  Making ideas manipulable  Involving multiple ways of thinking—verbal, visual, symbolic, & emotional  Limiting the issues  Summarizing design decisions

Sequence Model

Exercise on Convergent Design

Getting the Ambiguity Out (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Convergent design = a design process that consciously and visibly recognizes, defines, and removes ambiguity as effectively as possible

Examples of Ambiguity  Create a means for protecting a small group of human beings from the hostile elements of their environment

Examples of Ambiguity

Convergent Design Exercise (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  You need to work independently  Privately writing your best estimate so as to make a firm commitment, and capturing your first impressions, so you won’t forget them when you hear other opinions

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Question 1:  How many points were in the star that was used as a focus slide for this presentation?

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  The 100 participants provided 18 different answers Over 32 infinite 75

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Question 2:  What factors do you think are responsible for the differences among answers?

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Observational & recall errors  Interpretation errors  Mixtures of sources of error  Effects of human interaction

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  The second poll Over 32 infinite 75

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  The second poll Over 32 infinite 75

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Question 3:  Write down, verbatim to the best of your recall ability, the question that you think you answered in question 1

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Question 4:  Write down the variants to the question that you think the other classmates wrote when they were asked to recall the question that they thought they were answering

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  From this exercise, what did you learn? And how is it relevant to systems analysis & design?

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg, 1989)  Each variant statement of this relatively trivial problem does produce a different way of looking at the problem, which in turn produces a different solution.  Our problem statements must be precise