Duc Pham

CMIS 351-B01 LUO

2/6/2011

Module 3 Minicase ssignment 2 A

a. Explain in clear, nontechnical terms, the goals of the Analysis phase of the
project.

The Analysis Phase is where the project lifecycle begins. Its main focus is capturing the
business requirements for the system. The analysis phase answers the questions of who will
use the system, what the system will do, and where and when it will be used. During this
phase, our analyst team will investigate any current system(s), identifies improvement
opportunities, and develops a concept for the new system, and break down high-level
requirements into more detailed business requirements. We will also be identifying the
overall direction that the project will take through the creation of the project strategy
documents. At the end of analysis, all of these deliverables, along with revised planning and
project management is determined.

Analysis phase will consist of three steps:

(1) Analysis strategy - We will incorporate the problem analysis technique to identify the
business needs based on the “as-is” system and its current problem, and then
evaluate and indentify improvement opportunities for the “to-be” systems. For
example, issues that should be indentified: complex work performed by personnel,
accounting software is no longer adequate, etc.
(2) Requirement gathering – We will be conducting interviews with the staff and project
sponsor. Root cause analysis will be utilized to address the problems and its priority,
and if possible, indentify the possible root causes of those problems. Our analysts
will investigate each of the root cause in attempt to find the solutions for the highest
priority of the problems. The system concept is then used as a basis to develop a set
of business analysis models that describes how the business will operate if the new
system were developed.
(3) System Proposal - System proposal is the initial deliverable that describes what
business requirements the new system should meet and consists of the analyses,
system concept, and models. Upon completion of the documentation of the system
proposal, we will present it to the project sponsor and other key decision makers
(e.g., members of the approval committee) that decide whether the project should
continue to move forward

b. Explain in clear, nontechnical terms, how use cases and use case diagram will
be used by the project team. Explain what these models are, what they represent
in the system, and how they will be used by the team.

Use cases are the primary drivers for all of the UML diagramming techniques. The use case
communicates at a high level what the system needs to do, and all of the UML diagramming
techniques build on this by presenting the use case functionality in a various ways for a
different purpose. Use cases are the building blocks by which the system is designed and
built. Use cases are basic descriptions of a system’s functions from the perspective of the
users. These interactions represent the external, or functional, view of the system from the
perspective of the user.
Use case diagrams are diagrams in that they portray the basic functions of the system. For
example, what the users can do and how the system should respond to the user’s actions.
Duc Pham
CMIS 351-B01 LUO
2/6/2011

Creating use case diagrams is a two-step process: First, the users and project team will
work with our analysts to write text-based use case descriptions. Second, we will work with
the project team to translate the use case descriptions into formal use case diagrams. Both
the use case descriptions and the use case diagrams are based on the requirements from
the Analysis phase.

Reference:

Dennis, Alan, Barbara H. Wixom, and David Tegarden. 2009. System Analysis Design UML
Version 2.0: An Object-Oriented Approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.