WEEK 3 LECTURE

2 Weeks gone and here we are in the 3rd week of my journey. The title of this week lecture is "Requirements gathering" and we basically go into greater detail on the Analysis Phase. The activities of Analysis phase are: Define System Requirements, Prioritize requirements, prototypes for feasibility & discovery, Generate and evaluate alternatives & review recommendations with management.

To begin with we must know what is actually "System Requirements". Basically, they are specifications that define the functions to be provided by a system. System requirement is divided into 2 parts:

1) Functional Requirements: are activities that the system must perform which are usually business functions or processes.

2) Non-functional requirements: are characteristics of the system other than activities it must perform. Such as usability, security, performance, technical and reliability.

But to acquire system requirements you need to know about their source in greater detail as well. Source of System requirements are usually the stakeholders, users, clients and technical staff who all have a genuine interest and are affected with the implementation of a new system or changes made to an existing system. Another new concept has been mentioned in week 3 lecture was "Business Process Reengineering". The objective of this technique is to streamline internal processes to be as effective and efficient as possible.

Then i learned about the information gathering techniques namely:

1. Review existing reports, forms, and procedure descriptions
2. interview and discussion processes with users
3. Observe and document business processes
4. Build prototypes
5. Distribute and collect questionnaires
6. Conduct joint application design (JAD)
7. Research vendor solutions

Then we must know how to validate these requirements. Now i'm looking forward to the tutorial 3 since i understood most of the things in the week lecture.... :)