Introduction: Holmes School and Its Problems

Discuss about the Design of Requirements Modelling Languages.

The Holmes school is experiencing a surge in customers an applicant when they decided to expand their line of business. This has proven to be particularly stressful in terms of their current system in place that processes these applicants and handles administrative and financial tasks within the school. As a result, a system analyst has been contacted who can help plan a system for them which then can later on be developed by outsourcing the work to a third party company. The system analysis will help the company in framing the entire requirements of the system and organize it in a meaningful way that helps all stakeholders being currently involved with the system. When the system analysis has been done and the report has been prepared, it will be much easier for the stakeholders to understand their own requirements in a better way and at the same time would help the future developers of the system in understanding the purpose of the system. As a system analyst, the primary task is to understand the business problems and then frame the requirements of the system with the help of the staff and the executive officers of the organization. Once this is done, the requirements can then be segregated between functional and non-functional requirements and further requirements can be added from technical perspective as the staff would not be able to talk about every single requirement in detail. As a result, the analyst has to also draw from past experience and other business cases in order to complete the task. This report covers system in general, the business problems this system intends to solve, the system requirements covering both functional and non-functional requirements as well as use-case diagram and its description.

Holmes School is a private non-profit organization based in the Midwest, United States. The school had been operating for the past 20 years. Their primary line of business is offering full-fledged curriculum for pre-schoolers until the 6^th grade. 5 years ago, they expanded their line of offerings in order to offer after-school care which is also known as after care-on-premises care. This service is being offered to not just Holme’s students but also for students from other schools in the same area. However in recent years, there has been surge in the number of applicants and students as it decided to expand their line of operation. The organization being a non-profit one, cannot handle hiring of another administrative personnel to handle the increased workload and is instead looking for the help of ICT to help manage the increasing workload.

• School staff is currently responsible for processing of data, however there’s a major issue here as the same staff are also handling teaching in some of the departments.
• The staff member who are looking after the Payroll related tasks are also engaged in some other important tasks in the organization.
• Manual copying of data from one particular location to another increases errors while also leading to duplication of data. This also results in data being inconsistent.
• The data here is being stored in MS excel and word files. These tools are currently inefficient with respect to Payroll processing.
• The staff are also handling the manual processing of monthly bills, bank deposits and handling payments to staffs and third parties.
• The staff are also manually sending he bills to parents and also there’s no mechanism in place that checks if the bill is being received on time or not.
• Reports are being distributed manually to the top level management.
• There are no automatic generation of bills, reports an receipts.
• The bills being generated do not have all the details of the students.
• Currently no provision has been made for late submission of fees.
• Currently there is also no provision for storing any history of the student.
• There is also no provision for such students who leave the school in between of their curriculum.
• There reports are inefficient and they do not have high impact on decisions of the management.

Among them, the most critical problem is the manual copy of data from one location to another. Since the organization does not have an efficient database system or a dedicated data processing system in place the data is being handled manually (Holt, Perry & Brownsword, 2012). An effective data processing system is the corner store in efficient organization management. Without an effective system, the organization will lack in day-to-day activities. The current method of data management is not only inefficient but also leads to data loss, data duplication, errors and redundancy. All, these redundancies and errors do not seem to be of paramount importance at first but when they start stacking up, one soon realizes that it has become too late for them to effectively make something out of it or even go by their day to day business activities efficiently. With the manual handling of data, it also does not have any provision of retrieving a particular data quickly. So, if in case, a staff wants to locate a particular record of a student who studied in a specific year, they would have to locate the files from that year and manually search for it and if it was a much complicated task such as finding how many students manage to barely pass grade in the past 5 years, it would become a much a much challenging and time-consuming task.

Following are key functional requirements of the proposed system:

• The current manual system at place could not help in the near future. The reason behind this is that the manual system would be quite restricting for the school.
• Roles and privileges would be defined for every single person who is supposed to work on the system. This particular feature would help secure data and also protect it from unauthorized access. No financial information would be made accessible by any volunteers as it’s one of the most pressing concerns of the organization.
• Bills would be generated automatically at the end of every month. This feature would help in tracking the overall revenue system. Also, the school could then help take managerial related decisions more effectively as they have the complete record of cash flows.
• The bills and bank receipts would also be handled automatically as the bills would generated automatically instead of manually.
• Parents would also be able to submit fees online. This feature would however require integrating the system with a payment gateway and merchant bank payment processor. Fees can be paid via multiple payment options including Debit, Credit Card and Internet based wallets.
• Parents would also be able to register themselves on the system via web-interface on the behalf of their children.
• The system would also have a user management system in place. With the help of this, parents would be able to manage their accounts, and also thereafter perform tasks related to deletion of account, changing of their password, updating communication details and archiving of data among others.
• The history of payment for the users would also be made available. This would essentially mean that the parents would able to track payments from themselves towards their kid’s fees for the current academic year as well as for any other extra-curricular activities that is listed in their history section.

The system would have a non-functional requirements as well that deals with system legibility, aesthetics and usability.

Usability

• Ability to allow the system support multiple languages based on the language choices selected by the user.
• Ability for the users to have clear and readable texts within the system by all kinds of users.
• Ability for the system to have an effective layout and presentation of information that is clean and simple (Jureta, 2015).

Reliability

• To ensure that the system is always operational and if at all there is a downtime, either planned or unplanned, then it should be no more than 48 hours for severe problems and no more than 24 hours for low and medium level issues.
• To ensure that the frequency of failures and downtime is no more than once in 3 months.  (Maciaszek, 2007).

Performance

• To ensure that the response time for each of the user’s action is rapid and that the corresponding system response is nearly instant.
• To ensure that the payment processing time on the web is nearly instant and that it does not take much time.
• To ensure that the time taken for any retrieval of information such as a simple query or even reports are quick.

Supportability

• To ensure that the system has been designed as per coding and design standards to produce a clean and issue free code.
• To ensure that the system being developed is scalable in the near future and can be extended if needed.
• To ensure that the system being developed is compatible with the operating system, hardware and other services being in use with the school at present.

References

Holt, j., Perry, S. A. & Brownsword, M., 2012. Model-Based Requirements Engineering. s.l.:Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Jureta, I., 2015. The Design of Requirements Modelling Languages: How to Make Formalisms for Problem Solving in Requirements Engineering. s.l.:Springer.

Maciaszek, L., 2007. Requirements Analysis and System Design. s.l.:Addison-Wesley.

Pressman, R. S., 2015. Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach. 6th ed. s.l.:McGraw Hills.