ICT310 System Analysis and Design- Extreme Programming

Review the Comfort Quilts Limited case study and prepare an event table for the information system to support the business processes as described. Use at least the following headings Review the Comfort Quilts Limited case study to prepare a domain model class diagram for the supporting information system.

Prepare a Design class diagram for the Purchase and Shipper classes ONLY. These two classes should be part of the Domain model class diagram solution for the previous question. 

Review the Comfort Quilts Limited case study and your event table solution from question 1 to prepare a Use Case diagram for the supporting information system.

Answer:

This report comes with respect to the request from the management to determine the best agile system development methodology that best fits the implementation of the new information system. The report considers the Extended Programming agile system development approach as the best of all the other methodologies in the implementation of the new information system for Comfort Quilts Limited. The report spans through the main aspects of the extended programming system development methodology which are: the role players in the development, the phases of development, and the adaptability property, the scope of the methodology and why it is the best methodology to be used in the implementation of the new information system.

Extended Programming XP is an agile or adaptive system development methodology. Adaptive or agility property means that the methodology is both iterative and incremental. Iterative in the sense that the development is not a one way process. Programmers go back to implement the functionalities that are left out or come up due to technological changes. Incremental in a way that the programmers are able to upgrade the functionalities of the system later on. XP involves developing different modules of a system with respect to the requirement specification, testing the functionality of each module and the system as a whole.  Several testing and error correction is done to the system in the various phases of the development stage before a system is rendered complete and ready for use by the customers who in this case are the Comfort Quilts Limited and their customers or clients.

 Roles and role players.

Manager. Is in charge of all the activities and processes involved in the development, implementation and deployment of the new information system. He or she is in charge of allocation of resources example funds that are required in the development process by the respective team players.

Programming overseer. This is the face of the programming team. He or she is experienced in the use of the Extended Programming approach to developing systems. He or she will be the person giving guidelines and instructions on how to go about various problems.  

Programmer. Asghar et.al (2017) this is the person responsible for transforming the customer requirements into modules, applications and finally a holistic system with both functional and non-functional functions.

Customer. The customer provides the programmer with the system requirement specification that he or she would like the programmer to implement to the system. He provides the needs that should be addressed by the programmer.

Tester. This is a person responsible for unit testing, acceptance testing and system testing for a system to be considered efficient. The tester finds an algorithm that finds the errors in a system. The aim of this is to find errors early enough before they propagate to other levels.

Tracer according to Tabassum et.al (2017).. This is a person responsible for keeping the tracks of progress by the programmers. He or she figures out where the development has reached, what achievements have been made compared to the goals that were set.

IT Consultant. Sedano (2017). This is an expert in a certain field but is not a member of the programming team. This person is only invited to offer a solution to a specific problem that has been difficult for the development team to crack.

Phases. XP has five phases which include.

Exploring phase. This is where the customers, Comfort Quilts Limited, give or specify the requirements that they would like the programming team to implement. Meanwhile, the programming team identifies and familiarize with the tool that are going to be used in the development of the new information system for Comfort Quilts Limited.

First release phase. This is the stage where the programmers give the customers a system that is based on the non-functional requirements. The functional requirements are less and the ones available are to be highlighted by the customer whether to be pursued or not.

Product release phase according to Abrahamsson et.al ( 2017). This is where the system is checked and tested for errors thoroughly before being released to the customers. In this stage the main functionalities of the information system are addressed.

Maintenance phase. This is done after releasing the product in the product phase. The system is now running but needs correction of some errors for it to be complete. Kropp et.al (2017) it involves adding some little functionality that were left out in the product phase or have just popped up.

Death phase. This is where the system is complete. It has satisfied both the programmers and the customers. There is no more function left out and programming has stopped. The requirement specifications have been all met by the system. 

Adaptive mechanism

Its adaptive nature being part of agile system development methodology makes it supported by a wide range of tools.

The ability of this methodology that enables it to be adaptable is that its scope is not fixed to one way of system development. Once the system requirements are set, the programmers try to find the best way to accommodate these requirements Anwer et.al (2017.)

Scope of use

Extreme is used by a team of programmers that range between a minimum of three programmers to a maximum of twenty programmers. Comfort Quilts Limited should higher programmers to develop, implement, and deploy the new information system.

It should be used where there is no communication-barrier. The programming team should be located in one place when developing the system. Balijepally et.al (2017). This is essential because communication between them is essential and needed from time to time during the development process. Comfort Quilts Limited has to set aside a room where the programmers will be located. It may be a room where they can all communicate and share the ideas on how to solve a certain problem.

 It is not sensitive to programming languages. It is supported by a wide range of tools and platforms. This enables it to be widely used. 

 Conclusion

Due to the flexibility property of the XP methodology, where programmers have to puzzle out all the possible ways to address the development, implementation and deployment of the new information system based on the requirement specification provided by the Comfort Quilts Limited, this approach is the best as it can accommodate a wide scope of requirements specification if not all.     

Bibliography

Balijepally, V., Chaudhry, S. and Nerur, S.P., 2017. Mob Programming–A Promising Innovation in the Agile Toolkit. 

Tabassum, A., Bhatti, S.N., Asghar, A.R., Manzoor, I. and Alam, I., 2017. Optimized Quality Model for Agile Development: Extreme Programming (XP) as a Case Scenario. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED COMPUTER SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS, 8(4), pp.392-400. 

Asghar, A.R., Bhatti, S.N., Tabassum, A. and Shah, S.A.A., 2017. The Impact of Analytical Assessment of Requirements Prioritization Models: An Empirical Study. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), 8(2). 

Anwer, F., Aftab, S., Shah, S.S.M. and Waheed, U., 2017. Comparative Analysis of Two Popular Agile Process Models: Extreme Programming and Scrum. International Journal of Computer Science and Telecommunication, 8(2), pp.1-7. 

Kropp, M., Anslow, C., Mateescu, M., Burkhard, R., Vischi, D. and Zahn, C., 2017, May. Enhancing Agile Team Collaboration Through the Use of Large Digital Multi-touch Cardwalls. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 119-134). Springer, Cham. 

Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J. and Warsta, J., 2017. Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439. 

O'Leary, P., McCaffery, F., Richardson, I. and Thiel, S., 2017. Towards agile product derivation in software product line engineering. 

Sedano, A.T., 2017. Sustainable software development: Evolving extreme programming (Doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University).