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The first step is to write a short description of the problem we have to solve. This description will help the development team to get a draft knowledge of what they have to produce as well as of system requirements. The description will be in plain English (or another physical language) and will be the system’s analyst understanding of the system. Typically, s/he should contact the end users to verify that his/her understanding of the system is correctly and fully specified in this description. This step goes after getting system’s requirements straight. It helps to understand system requirements. Requirements analysis is not discussed extensively in this book, but a short introduction is given in chapter5 .
In this step we can also write down some assumptions for our system under development, we shall analyse the risk factors for the development or not of the system (i.e. factors of success or failure) and look at the market factors (how competitive shall our system be?).
The description papers we have to produce during this step are summarized below [Schneider & Winters, 1998]:
An example system description that we shall use in our analysis is:
There is a need for an automated library system that permits the registration of books, magazines, documents, electronic data storage software (CD, floppy, zip etc.) etc. The system must be able to provide distributed access. A user must be able to browse a library catalogue and be able to do a search to the catalogue (by author, by title, by ISBN and/or by keyword). The user will be able to apply electronically for a book loan and after approval, a token will be returned to him/her and s/he will be able to borrow the item from its physical location in the library. If the item is not available, s/he will be able to make a reservation on the item. Reservations will be stored in a FIFO list for the users.Once a book is returned to the library, the reservations list for the book is searched and the first user in the list is notified by email.
Each item will be registered to the library with the following information: ISBN, title, author(s), editor, publication date, keywords, a short description.
Each user should borrow an item for a specific time period. A user may extend the borrow time period of an item (i.e. re-borrow it) only if there is no reservation for the item by another user. Each user has a limit on the number of items s/he can borrow. If a user does not return an item in the specified time limit, s/he will be given a fine for each day of delay. The system should be able to notify a user by email if s/he has delayed to return an item. A list of the delayed items will be reported each morning to the librarian.
The information for each user to be stored to the system will be: UserID, name, phone number, address, email and number of books s/he is allowed to borrow. The system should also store a list of the borrowed items (ISBN, loan date, return date, borrower).
