Systems Analysis Course

• Home
• 1.What is a System
  • Introduction
  • Parts of a System
• 2.System Lifecycle
  • Project Management
  • Project Lifecycle
  • Check Understanding
  • SDLC Comparison
  • Exercise
• 3.Feasibility Study
  • Sections
  • Exercise
• 4.CostBenefit Analysis
• 5.System Investigation
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Identify method
  • Exercise
• 6.Data Flow Diagrams
  • Introduction
  • Video
  • Definitions
  • Steps to create
  • Exercises
• 7.Relational Diagrams
  • Terminology
  • Examples
  • Exercise
  • Using a DFD level1
• 8.Data Dictionary
• 9.Design Specification
• 10.Creating a Test Plan

 

 

Lesson 6 - Data Flow Diagrams

EXERCISE 6 - In small groups work practise creating DFD's using the following simple scenario's

Task 1

Create a simple Level 1 DFD to represent the process of you reading a book, extracting information and passing this on to a friend.

 

Task 2

Create a Level 1 DFD to depict the process of you arranging a party. Assume that you may contact your guests in person, by telephone or in writing.

 

Task 3

A health and fitness centre would like to introduce a computerised system for all its fitness assessments and other client bookings. Produce a Level 1 DFD to reflect the process of booking appointments for clients for fitness assessments.

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EXERCISE 7 - USING THE SCENARIO FOR IMAGINATION GAMES CREATE A HIGH-LEVEL DFD (CONTEXT DIAGRAM) AND A LEVEL 1 DFD

IMAGINATION GAMES

IG (Imagination Games) have asked you, a systems analyst to produce a feasibility report for the development of their royalty payment system.

This is a system that works out the amount due and pays freelance programmers for writing computer games for IG.

There are currently 100 freelance programmers that do work for IG. At the moment the accounts department work out payments using a spreadsheet.

Payment is calculated by number of hours worked x hourly rate.

As the programmers are freelance there is no need to calculate national insurance or income tax payments

This spreadsheet calculates the amount due and the accounts department then manually write the cheques and send them by post to the programmers. A copy of the spreadsheet is printed out and stored as a manual record of payments for the month.

This system relies on people entering in the correct hour’s and hourly rate information in the spreadsheet and then writing out the cheques correctly and sending them to the right address.

Currently this manual system produces a lot of mistakes that aren’t identified until the programmers complain they haven’t been paid correctly or haven’t received their money. The mistakes lead to staff in the accounts department having to do overtime in order to correct the errors. Last month overtime cost the company £500 (50 hours of overtime) .

You have spoken to the Managing Director of the company, and the two members of staff working in the accounts department, using the current royalty system. They have told you that they would like to have an automatic royalty payment system.

They would also like additional functionality in the system, they would like the royalty payments to be automatically calculated rather than manually entered into a spreadsheet.

If possible they would like to know each month by computer game, by programmer, how many hours the programmers have worked and how much they are being paid for this so that they can verify the cheques being produced by the system before they are sent out. They would also like to know each month the total amount of royalties being paid by the company.

Programmer’s hourly rate and address information is currently stored on the personnel system. Data on each programmer’s current hourly rate and address could be obtained from the personnel system each month. It would be useful if the data could be automatically transferred from the personnel systems to the royalty payment system.

The Managing Director has a budget of £4000 for the new development and he would like the system to be developed in 3 months and be up and running for the new financial year starting in April. The computer in the accounts department was bought 6 months ago and is running windows XP, word and excel.

Using the above information, write a feasibility study.

 

Copyright JK Nichols 2009