Database Structure of Tonys Chip Company - Report Example

Introduction Software requirements are descriptions of the services provided by an application and reflect stakeholder’s needs. Requirement engineering is the process of gathering, analyzing, specifying, validating and maintaining of requirements. Requirement engineering is a very important process of systems engineering concerned with the real-world goals for services offered and constraints on a large and complex software-intensive system. It is the foundation of the software and the most crucial tasks [1]. The main objective of this process is to ensure that users’ needs are met at a low cost and time. Requirement engineering has developed process and organizing information in a manner that will support conception and implementation. Requirement management is new aspect of software engineering that is being adopted by industry. It is the activity concerning control of information that relates to system requirements and specifically the protection of the integrity of that information for the life of the system and with respect to changes in the system and its environment. Requirements in software development process are dynamic, they keep on changing with time and it is hard to manage changes to agreed requirements. Another challenge is managing the relationship between requirements, how to manage priorities between the requirements and how to deal with dependencies between different requirement documents. Requirement collection is a phase which has various challenges especially requirements from an operational domain which is hard to manage and model. Requirements are supposed to be simple, concise and with a clear formatting according to the standard requirement specification templates [2]. It is in order for stakeholders and the maintenance team to understand requirements. It is the best practice to model practice to model requirements so that they can easily be validated by stakeholders. System requirements are classified as functional requirements and non-functional requirements. Both requirements are important and critical to achieve. Requirement engineers face the following challenges technological, economical, external events, Organizational issues, stakeholder’s conflicts and time as an important resource. Traceability is very important in requirement management. In order to manage requirements effectively traceability must be achieved. For requirements to be traceable, it means that the team is able to know who suggested the requirement and the reasons do why a particular requirement exists is known. The relationship between requirements and how they are related to other phases of system development is very important. Requirement management is the process of managing the changes to the requirements. It is very important since it ensures that the cost of dealing with errors and risks are minimized. It also ensures that time and effort is expended in a productive manner. If requirements are well managed then developers will be focused on user requirements. Requirement management is basically meant to keep in-sync and providing visibility to what is going on within a project. Requirement management is a process that involves collection, storage and maintenance of information. Process oriented Process-oriented programming is a software design approach which gives solutions to many of problem. This approach will be constructed as a network of isolated, concurrent processes that interact only using synchronization objects such as channels and barriers. Process-oriented programs show by their nature a high degree of explicit simultaneously which can be distributed across varies processors and clusters of a machine efficiently. Process-oriented approach is a design type that uses concurrency. Concurrency has been perceived as being fundamentally difficult, and to be avoided in all ways. Problem Tony’s Chips Company want to move the old Website from an externally hosted solution to internal one. Some of the concerns of the management of the company are the redundancy issue, where back-up system should be put in place in case the main system fails. The new web site should also have additional customer support where they can order products online. The main task as system designer is to detail how the architecture of the system will be designed. Another task is to detail the migration of the website from the existing to the new one with minimal downtime. Objective The objective of this paper is to adopt a software development life cycle (SDLC). The process to be adopted is iterative and progression which will enable expeditors accomplishment, efficient design and development of the project. This process will ensure there is transparent communication to foster an effective interaction and dialogue between the stakeholders in the conception, design, development, approval, testing, implementation, and revision process of websites and applications. Website / Application Requirements Outline 1. Feasibility analysis This is the first stage in system analysis and design and it is the most critical one in the development of the website. It is the analysis of the project to be done if it is doable. The process also involves evaluating input, output and processing requirements. Other requirements to be evaluated include the required technical analysis, Cost analysis benefits and schedules of the project. Technical analysis looks at the available software tools, hardware and professionals who will use the technology. The following are four major steps in feasibility analysis a. analysis of project requirement b. cost benefit analysis c. technical feasibility d. feasibility report Waterfall model Waterfall model integrated with Iterative model was used. It was selected since it ensures that the project is designed in stages where each stage is complete before moving to the next one. This reduces scope creep since all the requirements needed are exhausted before moving to design stage. Iteration ensures that the website will be upgraded regularly to meet the innovations and emerging trends in a dynamic technology area. 2. Analysis / Requirements-Gathering Software requirement specification is the second stage which include; collecting of the requirements from the stakeholders, analyzing and validating the requirements. This step also provides the schedule of the project on how each task will be accomplished. This stage is where stakeholders give their requirements. They respond to questions asked by the system analyst about what they want the system to do for them. This stage answers the questions “what” and “why”. The information can be gathered using different methods such as observation, discovery meetings, answering of the questions and reviews of the current system. In this case Tony Chips company wants to migrate the old system from external host to internal host. They also want to have an additional module developed which will allow clients to purchase products online. System requirements definition 1.0 FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS This describes what the system should do, the functional requirements for the project are: a. User information is captured into the system b. Clients should be able to place orders of products online c. Validate payment details of the farmers 2.0 Non-functional requirements a. Users should be able to register and log into the system within minimum time possible b. The system should provide a good user interface 3.0 System Requirements a. The system should be Pentium IV with 2.4 GHZ and above of the processor speed. b. At least 20GB hard disk c. Windows XP or higher version or Linux OS 3. Design – This is the implementation of the requirement specification of the system. Logical and physical models are designed I this stage. The new website will be designed based on new requirements. This begins the iterative process of: Input design The design below shows how users interact with the system while inputting data. The clients after browsing through the products once they want to buy the must have an account. They are required to register or log in if they have an existing account. Once they are logged in they can now place orders and pay for the products. Fig input design Processing design Flow chart for processing of data Architectural designs The design of the system is a description of the structure of the software to be implemented, the data, and the interfaces between the system components. The design of the system involves identification and formulation of data flow diagrams which constitute architectural design model and data structure for the application. The above architecture ensure that clients securely purchase items from the website and at the same time protecting the site against malicious people. Database specification Database structure of Tony’s Chip Company will be MySQL. a. Conceptual model The conceptual model is designed from a high level description of the entity relationship diagrams. From the previous design phases and flow charts it can be established that the following are the entities in the system 1. Clients of Tony Chips Company 2. Staff of the company 3. Product orders b. Logical model This is the logical schema of the database to be developed. The entity relation table are used in designing the logical model. The goal of the schema is to normalize the tables to remove redundancy in the database to ensure that the database is stable, flexible and scalable. Use case of the user Use case Description View catalog Actors: Customer The customer browses the catalog to see different products and order what he/she needs Validate Customer Actor: System The system validate the user once they log into the system by checking the password and user name used. Track order Actors: Staff and Customer The two actors track the order in all stages during processing, packaging, shipping and delivery. Ship order Actors: Staff The staff use the provided address by the customer to ship the ordered products Establish account Actors: staff and system The system validates the account details input by the customer. The staff also evaluate the account details to ensure that the customer has enough money to purchase the product. 3. Design Approval Approval is the stage where the management examines the system requirements, system designs and the data structure proposed for the system a prototype may be sued in this stage for the approving team to understand the proposed website system. 4. Development Development stage is where the above logical and physical designs of the system will be coded to produce the proposed system. PHP language was used in developing the system. The website was hosted locally by Wamp server where MySQL database was used. The system was tested during and after it was developed. Migration of the old web site was done in a systematic manner which is included in the Gantt chat. 6. Launch – The site or application goes live. Appendix Read More