• Home
• Sample Assignments
• CIS8000 Assignment 2

CIS8000 Assignment 2

CIS8000- ASSIGNMENT 2

Report on the Mobile-based

Application for Agriproduction

Executive summary

This report is a complete document that will provide application description in a detailed manner. This application is developed for the Agriproduction and the name of the application will be same “Agri Production”. This presented report will cover the major aspects of the application design ad deployment. The different section of the report will cover different information about the project. It will cover the detailed information and description of the method of application deployment which will be helpful in the mobile application development project. It will also include different aspects that are related to market like cost-benefit, competition in global market and proposition of value. These will be helpful to prove that this mobile application will be really helpful for the Agriproduction Company. This mobile-based application provides various advantages to the farmers also define and represents different manners in which it can help the farmers. This report covers the discussion about the whole development process and strategies of post-development to do marketing on various platforms of social media. The report also includes a discussion about the future scope of this application. In the end, it includes the conclusion about how the Agri Production application will provide benefits to the company as well as the farmers.

Background

This specific project is based on eth development of the mobile-based application that is to help the farmers by providing knowledge and news about the process of cultivation and agriculture. The information includes information about farming types of equipment, pesticides, seeds, etc. The services and functionality of this application include tracking functionality, news section, plan, etc. This specific project is selected as such kind of online agricultural and informative applications are very less in amount and this will aid in the agriculture field revolution. Almost all the customers need a digital platform for interaction rather than any physical visit. Thus the major motive behind this project is to develop an application which can provide constant interaction with the clients.

Research has shown that most of the people are using mobile phones and spend time on mobile rather than desktop. Also the mobile is very handy. This will allow the organization to build a healthy relationship with the customers by proving consistent information, communication, assistance, and services. So, it is important to take the requirements of the client into consideration during the application design process. It has been viewed that communities of the farmers are attracting towards digitalization. Thus, the application will allow the users to easily manage the access to facilities related to farming and cultivation and enhance the accessibility. This agriculture-based application is required to provide services and information to the farmer in case a farmer need any assistance of an agriculture expert, the application will be really helpful in this.

The proposed Agri Production application has the motive to serve and help the farmers anytime and anywhere with the help of internet. This is also beneficial for the company to improve the number of customers and enhance customer satisfaction

Proposed solution

The existing application has some issues which required be identifying and resolving. The major issues that are identified by the clients are:

• There is the situation when the user face errors during the creation of the work plan
• The application is not able to send a notification when new news or updating occurs in the system
• The application is not secure enough as it has no authentication or validation procedure.
• Also, the application is not user-friendly as it does not have a back button and help section.
• The farmer is not able to directly communicate with the
• The referral function is not available in the application and some of the pages take too much loading time.

In order to solve the issues, the proposed solution is to make a mobile-based application for the company Agriproduction. With the implementation of this solution, users and farmers will get the advantage. The modified version of the application will also reduce the errors in comparison to existing application and conventional methods. The implementation of the proposed solution will give following advantages to the Agriproduction Company:

• The news section will send a notification when new information is added
• Reduced amount of errors will allow the company to improve the rate of working and enhances communication.
• Improve customer satisfaction and build a healthy relationship with the customer.
• It will improve the security of the application and protection of data.

Cost analysis

It refers to the estimated and aggregated project cost that is needed in the development of a project. The table given below describes the analysis of cost for the proposed project of Agriproduction. The table given below describes the 5 years cost analysis from 2019 to 20123.

Table 1: Cost analysis

The project cost is aggregated and estimated according to the benefits of the project as per anticipated benefits (indirect or direct). Also, the pricing of software, purchase of infrastructure, maintenance and upgrade of infrastructure and software is included. The obtained pricing is $3,425 along and the Tax is $342. Thus the total project cost becomes $3,767. The total benefits of the project are $4,145 including indirect and direct benefits that refers that the net flow of cash will be $378 with 20.09% return rate.

Strategic alignment within the organization’s business and IT strategies

The Agriproduction Company is an agriculture company that offers services and information related to farming and cultivation. The company offers these services online through the application. The proposed solution of Agriproduction application will provide a simple and easy manner for the farmers to get information about crop and land. It also allows preparing and managing a work plan. It also includes videos and news related to agriculture field. The major motive behind this proposed application to ensure customer satisfaction by providing various facilities in agriculture and cultivation process on an online platform that is easily accessible and available.

Strategic planning for the Agriproduction Company consists of activities for management that will help to focus on the resources and priorities. It also assures that the members of the staff, farmers, and users are focused on the same motive. The main strategic motive of the application is to offer reliable and effective knowledge sources like agriculture experts. The application also spread about the latest farming-related technologies and tools. This offers status of the process and farmers can track the status. It also includes information about pesticides and soil quality. These kinds of functions will improve the application performance ad make the process simple and easy. It will display all the processes and information in an easy to understand manner. It also includes farm management.

The table given below displays the factors of alignment and strategic IT planning:

Table 2: Factors of alignment

Value proposition and other benefits

Value proposition plays an important role in the strategy of business and it is main principle for any business organization. This is used for the problem-solution definition, the advantages that are given by this new application to the audience and organization. The major motive behind the definition of value proposition is to find the reason why this suggested application is better than existing application and other competitors. The proposed application of Agriproduction is based on the farmers and agriculture field which offer various advantages (Powell and Hughes, 2016).

Advantages

These proposed applications provide several benefits to the farmers as well as the company because the application provides the digital marketplace to users. The advantages of the application include:

• Allow the user to check different crop, soil and land varieties
• Allow the users and farmers to establish direct communication with the help of live chat that will be helpful to resolve the issues of farmers.
• Another benefit of the application includes the videos to see the use of tools and implementation of latest technologies related to agriculture and cultivation process.
• Next advantage of the application includes news section that will aware the user or farmer about latest technologies, products tools, and government plans and other services that are related to the field of architecture (Payne and Frow, 2014).

Target customers or buyers

• Cultivators
• Agriculturist
• Farmers
• Graziers
• Shareholders
• The staff of the organization

Problems that are solved

• This application solves the issue of workflow because the application enables the farmers to check different crop, soil and land varieties.
• The application is also able to solve the communication and trust issue because the application includes functionality if chat which enables the farmer to communicate with the agriculture expert.
• The application will be helpful to manage the work plan and see the weekly status of the progress to keep track of the status.

Comparison to alternatives

• The Agriproduction is better in comparison to other alternatives as:
• This minimizes the complexity of farmers regarding workflow.
• The news section also includes blogs which will provide an update on the latest tools, technologies, etc., to aware the farmers about latest trends of agriculture field.
• Next reason is that it has the feature of videos which enable the farmers and users to view the videos that are related to agriculture, farming, and crops.

Project management and control

The organization’s IT department is responsible to oversee and handle the complete Agriproduction project as the department has enough and relevant knowledge in the field of technical development. This department also has experience in application design and development. The other departments of the organization who provide support for the application project include human resource department, governance, and different other departments. The manger of the project is responsible to manage the complete procedure of the application project. Meeting with the complete project team is act as a communication process to inform the executive members.

Infrastructure requirements

There are some assumptions that are made for the requirements of the infrastructure of Agriproduction application that consists of an online platform on which the mobile application will work. The assumptions about programming language and coding were also made.

Platform for development

This refers to the platform on which the development of the application will occur. This consists of various software-based tools which are helpful in deployment, development, and procedure of testing of the mobile application. The assumption refers that the platform of eth development can be one of the following; Salesforce, android studio, Appcelerator, etc. If the application is specifically developed for the platform of windows then the suitable platforms will be Microsoft’s Xamarin, Apple Xcode, etc.

Android studio is proposed software for the implementation and deployment of the Agriproduction application design because it is important to operate the application on all kind of mobile-based platforms, specifically android platform. This software includes various functionalities like order history, cart, sign-in, chat, sign-out, news, videos, etc.

Tools and coding language

As the Agriproduction application is a mobile-based application and runs on android platform. The android platform is selected as 85% of the people use Smartphone or mobile for the access of application. The tools and selected language for the design of the application are given in below table:

Table 3: Tools and language

Services from cloud

Cloud services helped to provide easy access and scalability of the application and its services. This is able to scale the resources for requirement fulfillment of the farmers and customers. This is also helpful for the online data storage of application. This is helpful to create a backup of the data as well as other solutions. The cloud services useful as in this technology the cloud service provider provide the hardware and software over the internet, this eliminates the requirement to invest in purchasing and maintenance of resources.

Software design, development methodologies, and testing strategies

The development and design methodologies of the Agriproduction application includes different measures like handling the issues and challenges that are IT related along with the common principles of project management.

Design of software:

The Agriproduction application is developed for the farmers and other customers to perform and access various services like live chat with agriculture experts, work plan, get information about the land, soil, etc., view news about latest tools and technologies related to the agriculture field. The application is designed for the android based platforms that will easily run on tablets as well as mobile phones to provide proper integration. The object-oriented deployment will be used in the design of software. The main motive behind using the object-oriented development is that will support merging of code and data into one object. This will collapse the application into small sections. These sections are able to easily modify according to the user requirements

Methodologies of development

There are many methodologies for the development and designing of the project. The project development methodologies include extreme programming, agile, waterfall, rapid, prototype and so on. The most suitable methodology for this project is Agile methodology from all of these methodologies. This refers to the continuous testing and looping of the process of development throughout the complete lifecycle of development. This has various different features which make it helpful for the application’s continuous development to enhance the customer satisfaction (Al-Zewair et al., 2017). The major motive behind using this methodology is that it enables to do testing at every phase of the project development to find the issues and also enables to do modifications during the complete process (Edeki, 2015). The advantages and reasons behind using the agile methodologies are given in below table:

Table 4: Advantages of agile methodology

Strategies of testing:

Throughout the complete procedure of the application development, testing will be performed to assure the error-free operations and functionality of the mobile application. Different types of testing are included in the testing plan which covers system testing that refers to testing of complete mobile app, testing of the program which refers to testing of every code and then user acceptance testing which refers to the testing of user’s perspective towards the working application. According to a survey, almost every user does not prefer a poor functional application. Thus it becomes necessary to test each and every aspect of eth application to assure high-level performance and functionality of the application that will enhance customer satisfaction.

Internationalization

This refers that making the application globally recognizable and brings the application to the worldwide level. This process is helpful to increase the number of customers at international level. This procedure is helpful for the company to expand the services of Agriproduction worldwide. The implementation and adoption of the internationalization have different challenges that are given below:

Risk related problems:

There are always risks in the procedure to introduce any application globally. Policies and laws related issues can always occur. Also, there are risks of data loss. Different approaches of migration can be selected for the implementation of application in global market to resolve the problems.

Cultural issues:

Different places and countries have their different cultures, thus this application should support the clients to select the language according to the region. There may be cultural challenges if the application is not supporting various languages (Anderson, 2013).

Selection of right market:

Global markets and home market both have different situations. Thus, it is important to select the right market. Thus, it becomes important to take the marketing strategies into consideration. Strategies of marketing include different aspects such as logistics, price, promotion, product, competition, etc.

Social media

Social media platforms play an important role for the promotion and advertising of the application globally as well as locally. Different platforms of social media include facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. These platforms will be helpful in marketing of eth Agriproduction application.

Importance of social media linking:

Using social media platforms are more influencing in comparison to other strategies of marketing. The reason behind this is that most of the clients are active on any of social media platform and spend a lot of time on these (Heing, 2018). Next reason for linking of social media platform with the application is that it provides open platform for the illustration of individual’s mindset.

How to do social media linking:

Social media linking is important for the application to reach to the end-users and clients:

• A page for the application can be created to display the information and features of the applications along with the advantages on the Facebook as this is popular among people of all age.
• Bloggers can be hired to post different attractive blogs about the application for the promotion of the application
• Different e-commerce platforms can be used for the promotion of the application by showing the advertisement of the Agriproduction application on their website (Voorveld et al., 2018).

Strategies of API:

API strategies include UI/UX for social media. With the help of this, farmers and other end users can easily log into the Agriproduction application on any of the social media platform. As most of the users feel hesitation to make an account, thus social media login can be helpful for application access. During the phase of development, this option of login through Gmail or facebook can be added.

Risk management

Along with a number of benefits, there are various risks associated with this mobile-based application. Thus, it becomes important take consideration of these risks along with implementation of application. Different approaches for risk migration can be used to overcome such issues (Aven, 2016) and (Kakkar, Kakkar and Shah, 2015). Some of these risks are given below:

Table 5: Risks in the system

Mitigation plans

The risk mitigations plans for the risks are given below:

Table 6: Risk mitigation plans

Integration and deployment strategies

Integration: