Analysis

Part 1 -Determining System Requirements

1
 Learning Objectives
After completing this lesson, students should be able to:
 Describe options for designing and conducting interviews and develop a
plan for conducting an interview to determine system requirements.
 Explain the advantages and pitfalls of observing workers and analyzing
business documents to determine system requirements.
 Explain how computing can provide support for requirements
determination.
 Participate in and help plan a Joint Application Design session.
 Use prototyping during requirements determination.
 Describe contemporary approaches to requirements determination.

2
 Performing Requirements Determination

FIGURE 6-1
Systems development life cycle with analysis phase highlighted 3
 The Process of Determining Requirements

Good Systems Analyst Characteristics:

Impertinence—question everything

Impartiality—consider all issues to find the best organizational solution

Relax constraints—assume anything is possible
Attention to details—every fact must fit
Reframing—challenge yourself to new ways

4
 Deliverables and Outcomes

Deliverables for Requirements Determination:

From interviews and observations
interview transcripts, observation notes, meeting minutes

From existing written documents

mission and strategy statements, business forms, procedure manuals, job descriptions,

training manuals, system documentation, flowcharts

From computerized sources

Joint Application Design session results, CASE repositories, reports from existing systems,

displays and reports from system prototype

 Traditional Methods for Determining Requirements

Interviewing individuals
Interviewing groups
Observing workers
Studying business documents
Interviewing and Listening

One of the primary ways analysts gather information about an information systems project
An interview guide is a document for developing, planning and conducting an interview.

6
 Guidelines for Effective Interviewing

Plan the interview.

 Prepare interviewee: appointment, priming questions.

 Prepare agenda, checklist, questions.

Listen carefully and take notes (tape record if permitted).
Review notes within 48 hours.
Be neutral.
Seek diverse views.

7
 Interviewing and Listening (Cont.)

FIGURE 6-2 Typical interview guide

8
 Choosing Interview Questions

 Each question in an interview guide can include both verbal and non-
verbal information.

Open-ended questions: questions that have no pre-specified answers

Closed-ended questions: questions that ask those responding to

choose from among a set of specified responses

9
 Interviewing Guidelines

Don’t phrase a question in a way that implies a right or wrong answer.

Listen very carefully.
Type interview notes within 48 hours after the interview.
Don’t set expectations about the new system unless you know these will be deliverables.
Seek a variety of perspectives from the interviews.

10
 Nominal Group Technique (NGT)

A facilitated process that supports idea generation by groups

Process
Members come together as a group, but initially work separately.

Each person writes ideas.

Facilitator reads ideas out loud, and they are written on a blackboard or flipchart.

Group openly discusses the ideas for clarification.

Ideas are prioritized, combined, selected, reduced.

Used to complement group meetings or as part of JAD effort

11
 Directly Observing Users

 Direct Observation
Watching users do their jobs
Used to obtain more firsthand and objective measures of employee interaction
with information systems
Can cause people to change their normal operating behavior
Time-consuming and limited time to observe

12
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents

Document Analysis
Review of existing business documents
Can give a historical and “formal” view of system requirements
Types of information to be discovered:
Problems with existing system
Opportunity to meet new need

13
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

Types of information to be discovered:

Organizational direction
Names of key individuals
Values of organization
Special information processing circumstances
Reasons for current system design
Rules for processing data

14
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

Useful document: Written work procedure

For an individual or work group
Describes how a particular job or task is performed
Includes data and information used and created in the process
Formal Systems: the official way a system works as described in
organizational documentation (i.e. work procedure)

15
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

 Informal Systems: the way a system actually works (i.e. interviews, observations)
Useful document: Business form
Used for all types of business functions
Explicitly indicates what data flow in and out of a system and data necessary for the
system to function
Gives crucial information about the nature of the organization

16
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

Potential Problems with Procedure Documents:

May involve duplication of effort
May have missing procedures
May be out of date
May contradict information obtained through interviews

17
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

FIGURE 6-4
An invoice form from
Microsoft Excel

18
 Analyzing Procedures and Other Documents (Cont.)

Useful document: Report

Primary output of current system
Enables you to work backwards from the report to the data
needed to generate it
Useful document: Description of current information system

19
 Contemporary Methods for
Determining System Requirements
Joint Application Design (JAD)
Brings together key users, managers, and systems analysts
Purpose: collect system requirements simultaneously from key people
Conducted off-site

Group Support Systems

Facilitate sharing of ideas and voicing of opinions about system requirements

 End Result
Documentation detailing existing system
Features of proposed system

20
 Joint Application Design (JAD)

FIGURE 6-6 Illustration of the typical room layout for a JAD

21
 Joint Application Design (Cont.)

JAD Participants:
Session Leader: facilitates group process
Users: active, speaking participants
Managers: active, speaking participants
Sponsor: high-level champion, limited participation
Systems Analysts: should mostly listen
Scribe: record session activities
IS Staff: should mostly listen

22
 Contemporary Methods for
Determining System Requirements

CASE tools
Used to analyze existing systems
Help discover requirements to meet changing business conditions
System prototypes
Iterative development process
Rudimentary working version of system is built
Refine understanding of system requirements in concrete terms

23
 Using Prototyping During
Requirements Determination
Quickly converts requirements to working version of system
Once the user sees requirements converted to system, will ask
for modifications or will generate additional requests

Figure 6-7
The prototyping methodology
24
 Using Prototyping During
Requirements Determination (Cont.)

Most useful when:

User requests are not clear.
Few users are involved in the system.
Designs are complex and require concrete form.
There is a history of communication problems between analysts and users.
Tools are readily available to build prototype.

25
 Using Prototyping During
Requirements Determination (Cont.)

Drawbacks
Te ndency to avoid formal documentation
Difficult to adapt to more general user audience
Sharing data with other systems is often not considered
Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) checks are often bypassed

26
 Radical Methods for Determining
System Requirements
Business Process Reengineering (BPR): search for and implementation of
radical change in business processes to achieve breakthrough
improvements in products and services
Goals
Reorganize complete flow of data in major sections of an organization.
Eliminate unnecessary steps.
Combine steps.
Become more responsive to future change.

27
 Disruptive Technologies

Information systems must be applied to radically improve business processes.

Disruptive technologies are technologies that enable the breaking of long-
held business rules that inhibit organizations from making radical business
changes.

28
Disruptive Technologies (Cont.)

29
 Agile Methodologies

Continual user involvement

Replace traditional SDLC waterfall with iterative analyze–
design–code–test cycle
Agile usage-centered design
Focuses on user goals, roles, and tasks

30
 Continual User Involvement

FIGURE 6-9
The iterative analysis–design–code–test cycle

31
 Agile Usage-Centered Design Steps

Gather group of programmers, analysts, users, testers, facilitator.

Document complaints of current system.
Determine important user roles.
Determine, prioritize, and describe tasks for each user role.
Group similar tasks into interaction contexts.
Associate each interaction context with a user interface for the
system, and prototype the interaction context.
Step through and modify the prototype.

32
 Summary

In this chapter you learned how to:

Describe interviewing options and develop interview plan.

Explain advantages and pitfalls of worker observation and document analysis.

Explain how computing can support requirements determination.

Participate in and help plan Joint Application Design sessions.

Use prototyping during requirements determination.

Describe contemporary approaches to requirements determination

33