1. Information Systems Development
Chapter 10
Information Systems Development

2. Study Questions Q1: What is systems development?
Q2: Why is systems development difficult and risky?
Q3: What are the five phases of the SDLC?
Q4: How is system definition accomplished?
Q5: What is the users’ role in the requirements phase?
Q6: How are the five components designed?
Q7: How is an information system implemented?
Q8: What are the tasks for system maintenance?
Q9: What are some of the problems with the SDLC?
How does the knowledge in this chapter help Fox Lake and you?

3. Q1: What Is Systems Development?
Video
Process of creating and maintaining information systems
Involves all five IS components
See author video

4. Q2: Why Is Systems Development Difficult and Risky?
Many projects never finished. Those that finish often 200–300% over budget.
Some projects finish within budget and schedule, but never satisfactorily accomplish their goals.

5. Five Major Challenges to Systems Development
Diseconomies of scale: communication problems, heavy load of benefits, difficult to coordinate, bureaucracy, etc.

6. Q2: Why Is Systems Development Difficult and Risky? (cont’d)
Difficult to determine requirements
What specifically is system to do?
How does wedding planner use new system to reserve a room or building?
What does data entry screen look like?
How does planner add/reduce facilities once wedding scheduled?
What should system do when a wedding is cancelled?
Facility schedule system interface with accounting systems? How?
Does system need to reserve floor or refrigerator space in restaurant kitchen?
Must create environment where difficult questions are asked and answered.

7. Q2: Why Is Systems Development Difficult and Risky? (cont’d)
Changing requirements
Large, long projects aim at moving target
Scheduling and budgeting difficulties
How long to build it?
How long to create data model?
How long to build database applications?
How long to do testing?
How long to develop and document procedures?
How long for training?
How many labor hours? Labor cost?
What’s the rate of return on investment?

8. Q2: Why Is Systems Development Difficult and Risky? (cont’d)
Changing Technology
Do you want to stop your development to switch to the new technology?
Would it be better to finish developing according to the existing plan?
Why build an out-of-date system?
Can you afford to keep changing the project?

9. Q2: Why Is Systems Development Difficult and Risky? (cont’d)
Diseconomies of scale
Brooks’ Law
“Adding more people to a late project makes the project later.”
New staff must be trained by productive members who lose productivity while training new members.
A later project costs more and increases the unit price.

10. Yes and No Is It Really So Bleak?
Systems development is challenging, but solid methodologies exist that are successful when supported and managed properly.
Yes and No
Systems development life cycle (SDLC), most common process for systems development.

11. Q3: What Are the Five Phases of the SDLC?
Based on problem analysis and decision solving processes

12. Q4: How Is System Definition Accomplished?
Team of users and IT professionals
Small business may hire consultant to work with managers and key employees
Fox Lake: Jeff, Laura, Mike, Anne, and other key employees will define system

13. A Gantt Chart

14. Q4: How Is System Definition Accomplished? (cont’d)
Purpose: Increase revenue from wedding events
Goals: Eliminate or at least reveal schedule conflicts and improve maintenance tracking
Scope: Specify users or business processes that will be involved, or facilities, functions, events that will be involved
Define scope for new Fox Lake system

15. Assess Feasibility: Dimensions of Feasibility
Cost feasibility (economic feasibility)
Approximated, “back-of-the-envelope” analysis
Purpose: eliminate infeasible ideas early
Consider cost of previous projects, operational and labor costs
Schedule feasibility and operational feasibility
Ball park estimate
Technical feasibility
Do we have the hardware, software, personnel, expertise to complete project?
Organizational feasibility (legal feasibility)
Fits customs, culture, charter, legal requirements of organization
Alternatively, TELOS – five areas of feasibility - technology feasibility, economic feasibility, legal feasibility, operational feasibility, and schedule feasibility.

16. Form a Project Team Typical team Team composition changes over time
Systems analyst and/or business analyst
Managers
Programmers
Software testers
Users
Team composition changes over time
Active user involvement is critical throughout
System analyst – research problems, plan solutions, recommends hardware and software, coordinates system development to meet business requirements
Business analyst – research problems in business processes, work flow designs, organization structure to generate business requirements

17. Q5: What Is the Users’ Role in the Requirements Phase?
Review and approve requirements
Laura only person with knowledge of systems development,
she will work with development contractor to help specify Fox Lake’s needs
Component design – design phase of SDLC, system is usually decomposed into modules and subsystems for technical design and development.

18. Q6: How Are the Five Components of IS Designed?
Determine hardware specifications
Purchase it, lease it, or lease time from hosting service
Determine software specifications
Off-the-shelf, in-house developed, customized
Database design
Convert data model to a database design
Procedure design
Data model - an abstract model that documents and organizes the business data for communication between team members and is used as a plan for developing applications, specifically how data are stored and accessed.
Normal, backup, and failure recovery procedures
Design Job Descriptions
Create and define new tasks and responsibilities

19. Procedures to Be Designed
Figure 10-7
Automatic system recovery is a device or process that detects a computer failure and attempts recovery. The device may make use of a Watchdog timer.

20. Design of Job Descriptions
Teams of systems analysts and users determine job descriptions and functions
Duties and responsibilities for new jobs and revised jobs coordinated with human resources policies

21. Q7: How Is an Information System Implemented?
Building
Testing
Converting

22. Q7: How Is an Information System Implemented? (cont’d)
System testing
Test plan
Product Quality Assurance (PQA vs. QAP)
User testing
Develop test plans and test cases
Final say on whether system is “production ready”
Alpha testing (internal acceptance), Beta testing (external user acceptance)
PQA: the planned and systematic activities with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers error prevention. It may include ensuring conformance to one or more standards, such as ISO 9000 or a model such as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement training and certification program and service administered and marketed by Carnegie Mellon University and required by many DOD and Government programs for government contracts, especially software development.
QAP: quality assurance program for quality control in a form.

23. Design and Implementation for the Five IS Components

24. System Conversion Approaches
Pilot
Implement entire system in limited portion of business
Advantage: Limits exposure to business if system fails
Phased
System installed in phases or modules
Each piece is installed and tested
Parallel
Complete new and old systems run simultaneously
Very safe, but expensive, time consuming
Plunge (“Big Bang”)
High risk if new system fails, no fall back system
Only used if new system not vital to company operation
Cisco’s ERP Implementation approach – rapid iterative prototyping (conference room pilot, 0, 1, 2, 3, and cut over).

25. Q8: What Are the Tasks for System Maintenance?
Failure is a difference between what system does and what it is supposed to do.

26. Q9: What Are Some of the Problems with the SDLC?
Sequence of non-repeated phases
It rarely works smoothly, causing development team to go back and forth, raising costs and delaying project
SDLC Waterfall Method
Business requirements change
“Analysis paralysis”—projects spend so much time on documentation it hampers progress
Requirements documentation difficulty
Time and cost estimates for large project usually way off
People who make initial estimates know little about how long it will take or cost
Scheduling and budgeting difficulties

27. SDLC Waterfall Method vs. RAD
RAD – Rapid application development, is a software development methodology that uses minimal planning in favor of rapid prototyping.

28. The ERP Implementation Method at Cisco
Rapid iterative prototyping
A series of phases “Conference room Pilots” (CRPs 0, 1, 2 and 3)
System Conversion Methods
Parallel (keeping the old system running alongside the new system for the first couple of weeks or months)
Direct (within a day or over a weekend or holiday period)
Pilot (using the new system in only a small section of the company)
Phased (taking offline parts of the old system and replacing them with the corresponding parts of the new system)

29. Active Review Q1: What is systems development?
Q2: Why is systems development difficult and risky?
Q3: What are the five phases of the SDLC?
Q4: How is system definition accomplished?
Q5: What is the users’ role in the requirements phase?
Q6: How are the five components designed?
Q7: How is an information system implemented?
Q8: What are the tasks for system maintenance?
Q9: What are some of the problems with the SDLC?
How does the knowledge in this chapter help Fox Lake and you?

30. Experiencing MIS InClass Exercise 10: GardenTraker
Suppose that you and two or three other students have been groundskeepers at Fox Lake, and you have decided to go out on your own and open a business that offers landscaping services. Your goal is to develop a list of clients for whom you provide regular and recurring services, such as mowing, weeding, and pool cleaning, as well as specialty services, such as pruning, garden preparation, tree removal, sprinkler installation and repair, and the like.
Need information system for tracking customers, services you have provided, and services you are scheduled to provide in the future. As a new small business, you want a simple and affordable system based on Excel or Access. The name of the system is GardenTraker.

31. Experiencing MIS InClass Exercise 10: GardenTraker (cont’d)
1. Explain how you would use the SDLC to develop GardenTraker. 2. Define the scope of your system. 3. Explain the process you would use to determine the feasibility of GardenTraker. List data you need for such an assessment, and explain how you might obtain or estimate that data.

32. Experiencing MIS InClass Exercise 10: GardenTraker (cont’d)
Consider just the tracking of recurring services, and list all of the requirements that you can imagine for that functionality. Be specific and answer at least the following:
What data will you need?
How will you input that data? Show a mockup of a data entry screen, and describe how it will be used.
Using your mockup, describe how you will modify recurring service data.
Using your mockup, describe how you will cancel a recurring service.
Specify any other requirements you believe are important for tracking recurring services.

33. Experiencing MIS InClass Exercise 10: GardenTraker (cont’d)
Present your answers to item 4 to the rest of the class and obtain feedback from your classmates.
6. Modify your answer to item 4 based upon feedback you received in item 5.
7. Considering just the recurring services functionality, do you think it would be better to use Excel or Access for this project? List the criteria you used to answer that question. Summarize the consequences of making a poor choice between these two products.
8. What does this short exercise tell you about information systems development? Answer this question in such a way that you could use your answer to demonstrate your critical-thinking skills in a job interview