Experience of Assignment 1a

A pleasant Hello! to all those who are following my blog. This section of my blog deals with my personal insights and suggestions on Assignment 1a.

The whole purpose of the exercise in Assignment 1a was basically to be able to understand the system that CyberRoo wants by knowing what are their main requirements. Then an event table is constructed to show those requirements in a logical order using key elements of the event table i.e. Event name, trigger, source, use case, response and destination. Mastering or having an in-depth understanding of the event table and its elements is a skill needed for System Analysts to extract main requirements and system functional specifications from their clients.

Basically while doing this assignment i figured out that there are many ways to interpret system requirements and i decided to take a safer option by including as much possibilities as possible in my event table so unintentionally i don't neglect the main requirements. So in the process i ended up with 28 events as oppose to 18, 20, 22, or 24, that most of my fellow colleagues had for their event tables. Once again emphasising that there are many ways to interpret things and being a successful System analyst means getting your interpretation and judgement correct most of the times which obviously comes with experience and skills that you develop with time as you work with different systems.

I would like to give some suggestions for this particular unit and assignment is that there should be more practice exercises for event tables because at most times while doing the assignment i was not sure about what i was doing. That mainly goes to the lack of practice and lack of feedback on the exercises i did before. So i would like the Fit2001 organizers to look into this matter that more practice with soultions should be given before an actual assignment is actually told to be done. Another reason being that as an IT student i got only one shot to do this subject so i expect to master a particular knowledge or skill that i learn from this unit rather than just partially knowing about it.

At this point, i would like to appreciate the Forums and Blogs facilites of this unit which helped me tremendously in making clear some of the doubts that i had for this assignment and to my one close friend who helped me to make the transcript of the CyberRoo audio. These materials also gave me the start up direction for the assignment and a study group helps all the time to discuss and clear doubts on topics that we face as we do our assignments.

Overall, it was a mixed experience which had its bad moments and good moments. The bad part was that the assignment was full of ambiguities adding up to the stress i already had for other assignments . The good part was that i would've not learned much about this unit if it were not for this assignment. Now the link of event tables, class diagrams and use cases are beginning to make sense and their purpose is becoming even more visible.

In short these last two quotes sums up my Assignment 1a experience,

"A day not learning anything, is a day wasted in your life"

"No pain.... No Gain"

Thanks for patiently reading my blog.