Week 10

Wow! its a Monday morning and i just submitted my Assignment 1b in the assignment submission box. I was feeling so sleepy and tired after all the effort i put in assignment1b for the past few days.

I just realized that Fit2001 assignments can be mentally draining since a lot of thought goes into the assignment and wondered how tough the real system analyst would feel after going through all the work done in an analysis phase.

Anyways my Assignment 1b was basically a Requirement Specification Report which contained a title page, a coversheet, a table of contents, an executive summary, defining the system scope by using a context diagram, a use case diagram, a brief and detailed use case descriptions and (analysis) domain class models.

I made the report as professional as i possibly could and tried my level best to mention all user requirements and business functions in it. While doing this assignment i realized there are many ways in which things can be interpreted and it does not matter how the end result is as long as its logically possible.

For instance, when i was thinking about the problems and opportunities for the system, i was actually made to think what possibilities are there for the system in a logical and rational way.

Overall this assignment made me thoroughly understand the concept of object-oriented approaches which i could not understand it initially during tutorials and the lectures.

Now moving on to the lectures.....Week 10: Use case realization

Actually its part of the design phase where we use object-oriented design techniques to actually build a system based on the analysis phase. According to the lecture the object oriented design bridges the gap between user requirements and the programming aspects of the new system. Thus, programmers are able to understand what to program by looking at these object oriented models. During this lecture, i came across lots of diagrams that by the end of the lecture i could not make out which diagram was for which object-oriented model...hehe...:)

Maybe i was just too sleepy or i just need to go through the diagrams in own time becuase they can be confusing.

The lecturer higlighted important terms such as cohesion, coupling and use case controller as being important for exams. So i guess it was something for me to refer back later.

However there was one lecture slide that i did found really useful and thought was a good indication of what we have done so far and what are we going to do. This was a slide telling that:

Diagrams used during analysis phase: use case descriptions, use case diagram, activity diagram, domain model class diagram and system sequence diagram.

Diagrams used during design phase: design class diagram, interaction and package diagram.

This was a good overview of what all the diagrams were about. Luckily i had my printouts during the lecture or i would have missed this slide becuase apparently my lecturer moves between different slides very quickly that i sometimes lose track of which slide we are currently in.

Lecture ends and now i wait for my TUTORIAL class in a few hours........

For some reason we are behind in tutorials.... ARRGH!!

We were suppose to be doing Tutorial 10 on use case realization....but we were doing tutorial 9 on Data flow diagram....

At the end of this exercise we learnt how to identify a system boundary, divide the programming components and convert them into a system flowchart from a given system. Sadly, it took the whole tutorial time to try to understand the questions and we were not able to do the additional review questions.

Another tiring day..... and i am so not looking forward to my hectic schedule in week 9 where i have 3 assignments due in 3 consecutive days.....

Huh! .... my situation makes me remember a dialog from a movie " You can run but you can't hide"..... just reminds me that i have do my assignments somehow because i cannot stay away from them....

*Sheesh* i am so loving Monash now in my 2nd year.... ;)