Case 2

Background

Your company has just been awarded the contract for Home Town Bank. Work is to begin immediately. Your team has been selected to the do the analysis and design for the project. Jared Simpson, the project Manager, requested that your team attend a kick off meeting at 1:00 PM today.

Jared Simpson has been working for 12 years in software development and was hired two years ago by your company. In his previous job, he was responsible for the design of a successful web based applications based on the J2EE architecture for a major sports store chain. It provided both In tranet services to manage the company and Internet services to suppliers and customers. The application was a big success and played a major role in making the company one the most profitable sporting goods chain in North America. Jared was recently completing a three month training course in project management. This is first assignment as the project manager.

Christine Anderson will also be joining your team. Management has told her that she will be laying a key role in the design and development of the Home Town Bank system. She has worked for the company since it began four years ago and holds significant stock options in the company. Christine worked three years for a small start up company as a programmer prior to joining your company. She left the old company because she said that the work was routine, and she felt like she needed to be in a place where there were greater opportunities to grow financially and professionally. Since starting with the company, she has had the opportunity to learn and lead the company in the use of several new technologies that have helped the company win several contracts. She is well liked by everyone because of her contagious enthusiasm and has gained the respect both management and her coworkers. Christine likes a challenge and is ready to take on this one.

At one o’clock, Jared, Christine and the rest of the team file into the conference room for the first team meeting on the project. After the normal welcome, Jared gets down to business and asks the team to come up with a task list of activities to be done during the analysis and design phase by noon tomorrow. He explains that he needs this to put together the schedule for a meeting with management the next day. Christine immediately suggests that one of the first steps is to choose a type of architecture for the project. She recommends that we consider using PHP or possibly Ruby on Rails for this project. Jared immediately dismisses these options and says that we should be using the .NET or J2EE architectures. The discussion escalates as the both Christine and Jared become more defensive. There is a lot of confusion in the team with words like decomposition, design patterns, components, frameworks, layering and tiers being thrown around. These terms are being used inconsistently. You and other members of the team leave the meeting frustrated. Should we be using PHP, Ruby, J2EE or .NET? What is a layer, framework, tier, etc.? The only task identified during the meeting was the choosing of an architecture. What are the other tasks that make up the analysis and elaboration phases of the project?

Deliverables

Return and Report

  1. Be prepared to define the terms used in the discussion (decomposition, design patterns, components, frameworks, multilayered software architcture (Common layers in an information system logical architecture) and tiers).
  2. Contrast the benefits and weaknesses of the following architectures for developing web applications: LAMP, Ruby on Rails, .Net and J2EE.
  3. Describe and contrast each of the following frameworks for use in this project: Client/Server, Model View Control, and 3-tier frameworks for this project.

Design

  1. List and describe each of the tasks that are to be done during the analysis and the elaboration phases of the project.
  2. Draw a UML Use Case diagram for the Home Town Bank project.

Implementation

  1. Create detailed use case descriptions for each of the use cases identified in the design. Use the Detailed use case description template.
  2. Create high level sequence diagrams for each use case using an 3-Tier framework. View this example of a 3-Tier sequence diagram for the “Find a branch near you” use case.

Suggested Resources

Published on September 16, 2008 at 4:08 pm Leave a Comment

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