IFSM461 System Analysis and Design

Case Study

Handling financial and billing systems in businesses has always been a sensitive part of any business. Integrity and the general financial performance hags on a balance in the financial department. This project is focused on designing and analyzing the PEP invoicing and Billing system. The billing system is intended to perform basic financial operations in the company. The development of this system is done in a procedural approach as outlined in the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). System design is a part of the SDLC aimed at analyzing the system components for easier development.

Introduction

System design can be defined as the process of defining system modules, architecture, components, and the respective interfaces and sometimes data involved. The objective of this project is to examine the system from the perspectives of functional requirements and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements are the system functionalities, non-functional requirements on the other hand are the performance metrics of the system (Ransolin, et.al 2020).

The non-functional requirements of the system are focused on the system’s performance as mentioned (Kurtanović & Maalej, 2017). The major non-functional requirements of focus in this design are;

Security

Handling the sensitive financial records, the billing and invoicing system’s security is key in ensuring the integrity of the invoices and the general information contained in the system. A software system’s quality is measured against the security it offers and its ability to repel/ detect intrusions.

Reliability

Reliability is an aspect of the non-functional requirements that describes the system’s case in which it can be dependent upon. Handling the finance records in the invoice and billing section is a daily activity that requires the system up and running at all times of business days. This, therefore, requires a reliable software solution in the respective department of operation.

Functionality 

Under the non-functional requirements framework (FURPS), functionality describes the ability of the system to fulfill the actual requirements (functional) as intended by the system owners. In this case, the invoice and billing system should be able to perform all the non-functional requirements of the system as intended by the owners as a part of the non-functional requirements.  Other key aspects of the non-functional requirements include performance, usability, and supportability. These are key aspects of non-functional requirements as well to ensure the better performance of the system. Usability as one of the FURPS describes the ease of use of the respective system, supportability describes the system being able to be maintained in the future while performance on the other hand is the summary of the entire

System Analysis

Output Layouts

The output layouts specify the general output from the system as a result of a given action processed from the inputs supplied into the system. In this case, invoices are expected as outputs, delinquent reports generated on the 11^th of every month, payments receipts regarding that particular order.

Input Layouts

To generate and output the named files, the system requires the user to input order details including items purchased, quantity, shipping address, and the price per unit. The user will also be required to input report details such as the date and the report will be compiled automatically.

Context Diagram

Context diagrams are analytical tools designed to demonstrate the context of a given software solution or indeed any system. This is meant to illustrate the different entities and their interactions in the respective system (McCormack, et.al 2018). In this case, the context analysis demonstrates the association and operation of entities in the billing and invoicing department of the organization. Context flow diagrams are data flow diagrams in context perspective. This case illustrates the level 0 DFD diagram for the billing system.

ERD – Design

An Entity-Relationship-Diagram (ERD) is an analytical design tool aimed to illustrate the association of entities concerning the data and database. ERD is used to design data-driven applications (Chren, et.al 2019).

The ER-D design in figure 1 above illustrates the relationship between the major entities in the system. In this case, there is a comprehensive relation illustrated in the functional dependencies through PRIMARY and FOREIGN keys. Using the crow-foot notation, cardinalities are also demonstrated showing the intensity of relationships in the ERD design.

Use case analysis on the other hand is a common analysis tool designed to indicate the roles of the system's user roles. Use case analysis demonstrates the roles as per the user in terms of functional requirements in the usage of the system (Andrén, et.al 2017).

The use case above illustrates the major functions played by the billing/ invoicing officer, he/ she does not have the privilege to create an account or change credentials. The use case scenario starts from the user logging into the system and presented with an interface to chose a service to either generate a report or bill.

Data Flow Diagram

Data flow diagrams in system analysis are used to demonstrate the respective information flow between the involved entities. Information flow is key in facilitating an easy software development process by illustrating how the information is expected to flow in the system (Hu, et.al 2019).  The data flow diagram in this analysis seeks to illustrate the flow of information between the system and the entities involved in the case scenario.

Process Flow Model

The process flow model is also another analysis technique that is majorly focused on business process modeling (Corradini, et.al 2018). Closer to data flow, the difference is that process modeling illustrates individual processes, unlike data flow modeling that models flow between entities in the respective business space.

Conclusion

Developing the invoicing and billing system as indicated is procedural taking place in the stepwise manner (Xu & Peng, 2019). The analysis transforms the theoretical requirements outlined in the general language in a way that simple pseudocode or algorithm can be drafted out of the specifics in the analysis. The importance of the analysis process is to ensure easy coding by simplifying the business and functional requirements as demonstrated in this project. This could however be stretched into other analysis dimensions such as activity and state diagrams (Valacich, George, & Valacich, 2017). An activity diagram builds on the use case analysis in which the analysis instance is aimed at demonstrating the activity flow while the state diagram indicates the behavior of the system in different states of operation.

Reference List

Andrén, F. P., Strasser, T. I., & Kastner, W. (2017). Engineering smart grids: Applying model-driven development from use case design to deployment. Energies, 10(3), 374.

Chren, S., Buhnova, B., Macak, M., Daubner, L., & Rossi, B. (2019, May). Mistakes in UML diagrams: analysis of student projects in a software engineering course. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET) (pp. 100-109). IEEE.

Corradini, F., Ferrari, A., Fornari, F., Gnesi, S., Polini, A., Re, B., & Spagnolo, G. O. (2018). A guidelines framework for understandable BPMN models. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 113, 129-154.

Hidayat, N., Wongso, F., & Usada, B. Designs of Online Goods Inventory Information System in Pekanbaru's Paragon Komputer Based on Web. Jurnal Ilmu Komputer dan Bisnis, 11(1), 2338-2343.

Hu, M., Cleland, S., & Burt, S. (2019, October). Build up a Constructivist Learning Environment for Teaching First-year Students Data Flow Diagrams. In 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.

Kurtanović, Z., & Maalej, W. (2017, September). Automatically classifying functional and non-functional requirements using supervised machine learning. In 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) (pp. 490-495). Ieee.

McCormack, C., Marriott, K., & Meyer, B. (2018). Authoring diagrams that adapt to their viewing context. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 46, 20-34.

Ransolin, N., Saurin, T. A., & Formoso, C. T. (2020). Integrated modeling of built environment and functional requirements: Implications for resilience. Applied Ergonomics, 88, 103154.

Valacich, J. S., George, J. F., & Valacich, J. S. (2017). Modern systems analysis and design (Vol. 9). Boston: Pearson.

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