Report on the Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification (iLearn System)

  The trend of delivering education is changing day by day and many schools, colleges as well as universities are focusing to provide smart education to their students. As everyone knows, it is the era of technology and technology is one of the largest fields in the world that have an influence in every field of life. The universities and educational institutes are focusing on the digital learning systems to provide online lectures to the students where they can easily attend lectures, participate in the class, attempt their exams, share and access the lecture materials as well as many other functions they can perform. The report is all about the development of the digital learning system which named an iLearn system. In the report, it is discussed about the level of detail in the problem analysis context which is related to the requirement specification. The report is providing information that due to the lack of interactions among the development team and business stakeholders, the requirement engineers have to note down the information on the story cards. After analysis of the problem in the requirement specification, the requirement gathering section is providing brief information on the functional requirement and non-functional requirements of the system. Furthermore, some reflection is also provided on the requirement. It is discussed three important verification and validation concerns as well as some notable risks that are also provided in these documents. The section of the justify development model is discussing the selection of agile methodology and criticism of other software development models.  The use case diagrams and sequence diagrams are also provided in the report. In the last of the report, a discussion is made on the analysis and reflection on the maintenance of the system and the government rules.

Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            In this section, it is discussed about the problem faced by the education sector. The problems which are faced by the education sector especially school students and teachers. Everyone knows that the novel coronavirus has affected every field of life and the education sector is one of those fields. In this section, it is discussed and analyzed the problem related to the development and requirement specification and requirement gathering which is essentially important for the development of the digital learning system named as iLearn System. Furthermore, it is important to provide detail on the requirements for any project in the world at varying levels. It is because it has a very strong reason before working on the project that the client requirements are necessary to be cleared for better development. The clarity in the requirements is the major key for the successful development of the project because the development will only develop that it provided. It was also observed many times that clients were not satisfied with the developed software or project because some features and operations are useless for them because of unclear requirements.

            Moreover, the business stakeholders must have to communicate with the software development team to provide clear information and requirements for a better understanding of developers. The communication of the business stakeholders in the education sector must have to provide information that how the operations will be performed and what important features required in the website and application panels. The clear information will also provide clear insight into the software development team that what the client is requiring and expecting to be developed. But in this project, there are many difficulties as well as problems in gathering and specifications of requirements because the educational stakeholders cannot communicate properly with the software development team because of a load of educational operations on them as well as they have to manage many things for the student’s education. The iLearn system development is facing problems to specify requirements for the project because of a lack of communication with the educational stakeholders. The software development team has proposed the method to gather information from those stakeholders to specify the requirements and they used the story cards to gather general data on the requirements. The story cards which are used to gather information, very helpful to take a general idea that what the education sector needs to be developed.

            First of all, the iLearn system (digital learning system) development team identified the iLearn system must be an open system that could accommodate new features as well as the existing services and it is one of the most important requirements of the system. By interacting with the client owners of the iLearn System, the development team of the system has gathered some important information on story cards and then analyzed this information. They have identified that the project has three major requirements which are:

·         The system architecture should be incremental development and delivery of the system.

·         The system architecture should also allow for new applications/services attachment which must be available for use as well as can be replaced for the current system.

·         The architecture of the system must have cost-effective development because it is also possible that the system needs some extra installations of the system. So, the development including installations must be in the budget.

Requirements Gathering of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

Functional requirements of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            The function required for the iLearn system is important requirements that describe the functionalities, operations as well as workability of the website. these requirements are important for the system to describe the iLearn system functions and its related components. In the iLearn system, there are several types of functional requirements identified which make the digital learning system fully functional. The system has three different types of modules or components that have their own different types of functions and functional requirements. The modules are System administration, course management, as well as student module (Alharthi, Spichkova, & Hamilton, 2015). All of the functional requirements are provided in this section along with the iLearn system’s technological requirements.

·         The system must be simple and user-friendly interfaces provided to the administration, teachers as well as students

·         The system will have a standard three-layer model for the website application containing database, user interface, and the website application server system.

·          The system must be effective to store and organize the records of the students and faculty members including assignments, classes, video conferencing, chat contents, exams as well as attendance and results

·         The system must support various standard roles and responsibilities such as administration, teachers, students, evaluators, as well as it also has the functionality to add unlimited roles

·         The system must be facilitating users to create user groups for sharing content in the form of pictures and can communicate with each other.

·         The system must have the functionality to signup, login and logout for administration, teachers, and students

·         The system must enable the administration to analyze and manage system logs through GUI

·         iLearn system must have the ability to assign authentication to different users such as teachers

·         Students must be permitted to access the course resources in the system such as their lectures, previous contents, and notes.

·         The teacher can upload syllabus, assignments as well as quizzes for students

·         The system can allow administrators and teachers to publish notices for teachers and students

·         Allows the teacher to mark attendances and save on daily basis and can edit in case of a mistake

·         Administration can configure the services to share with authenticated teachers and students

·         Must allow teachers to upload marks and results.

·         Must allow sending and receiving emails and comments on the activities.

·         Must allow teachers and students to create video calling.

·         The teacher can manage the classrooms and students including revoking and granting rights for voice and video participation

·         The teacher can allow students to use whiteboard and screen sharing

Non-functional requirements of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

The non-functional requirements of the iLearn system are also provided in this document. The non-functional requirements are those requirements that exist in the system and support to functionalities of the system but they may not be seen on the screen. The non-functional requirements are associated and referred mostly to the background working of the system. Furthermore, these requirements also linked with the system attributes such as security, scalability, usability, maintainability, performance as well as reliability. Some most important non-functional requirements are given below.

·         The system signup, sign in and logout time must be short or the authentication of the iLearn system must be fast for the users

·         Record saving must also be fast and database tables must be indexed to save multiple records against one entity

·         The system must be available forever user defined in the requirements of the iLearn system

·         The system must have the ability to manage all records

·         External services can be used

·         iLearn system’s services can be used in external applications

·         Voice and video quality will be high

·         The data of the users, teachers as well as complete contents of courses especially exams and exam details must be secured

·         The system can easily manage overall data

Reflect on requirement of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            The requirement of the system which is provided in this report is providing brief information on the functionality of the iLearn system. These are the very significant requirements that define the functionality of the application system. In this section, it is discussed about functional requirements. The system will be reliable, usable as well as effective when the administration of the system can manage all of the courses, contents, teachers as well as students and generate the reports on every function of the system. The main functional requirement of the iLearn system is that the users of this system will be authenticated and can access to classrooms and educational contents and their personal records. Furthermore, video conferencing as well as whiteboard or screen sharing will allow the teacher to assess student’s learning and make all students interactive. The interaction among students and teachers is the major concern of this system because it will provide the actual classroom experience and the students can attend their classes from everywhere due to the availability of the system service.

Identify three potential Validation and Verification concerns

            In the requirement gathering, the requirement software engineer must have to consider different types of check for validation and verification.

·         Validity check – In the validation check, requirement engineer and the development team must have to align all of the requirements and information noted on the story cards, to identify the validity of the requirements and assess whether they can be implemented or not.

·         Completeness check – the requirements documents created after analyzing the information noted on the story cards, must include the constraints and requirements.

·         Prototyping – the prototyping creation is a very effective method to verify and validate the requirements. It is effective because the business stakeholders of the iLearn system can check or a short overview of the system and the requirement engineers can easily assess the requirements.

Risks of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            There can also be some important risks that can affect the development and functionality of the iLearn system. The very first risk is the monetary risk because the money can be wasted if it will not give positive results. The second major risk is the copyright risks because there are several digital learning software and application available in the market already. That’s why the iLearn system must be changed, unique and provide extra features to the users. In the copyright risks, the content which is provided to users can be matched with others and competitors can claim. So, it should be monitored from time to time and the business stakeholders must use digital right management for the projection of the system and the agreement license.

            Another risk is the content quality risk. To minimize the content risk, the teachers must have to follow the standards as well as the administration should monitor. The privacy risk is one of the very important and major concerns of the iLearn system because the data breachers as well as hackers or cybersecurity criminals can attack the servers and steal the information of students. these were the very important possible risks of the iLearn system that should be handled. On the requirements side, the stakeholders are unable to interact with the development team for several times, the information which is noted on the story cards may have some missing operations due to lack of communication. Due to the unclear information and requirements, some main functionalities and features may be missed (Aundhe & Mathew, 2009).

Justify the Software Development Process

The agile development process for development and why?

            For the development of the software development process, the agile software development model is selected with story card requirements. The client of the iLearn system has provided information verbally only in a short time and they are unable to meet as well as interact with the software development team. So, the development information provided was not enough to start the development. To overcome this situation, the requirement gathering team has used the story cards methods to note down the important information. The information which is noted on the user story cards was in the raw form and needed to be analyzed and processed to align properly to generate meaningful and effective requirements for the development of the system.

            It is also determined while gathering information for the project development that the project may need many changes during and after the development of the iLearn system if the educational stakeholders ask to change. So, it is decided to select the agile software development model to develop the iLearn system. The second reason for selecting the agile development model is that it encourages to make changes into the system during development as well as allow to make new components and integrate into the system. Furthermore, the agile methodology also provides the facility to develop the iLearn software in small components as the engineers will get the requirements. All of the story cards' information is processed and converted into meaningful requirements needed for development (Rees, 2002).

            Furthermore, the whole iLearn system development will be developed by using the agile methodology and started from planning. Planning in this process includes requirements gathered to form the story cards which will be designed and converted into the graphical requirements using the diagram modeling software. For this project, visual paradigm software was used to the creative use cases as well as sequence diagrams which are provided in the below section. After designing the requirement, the development of the iLearn system was started. To check the workability of the system and functionalities, the testing principles like white box and black box testing are also applied to check the validity and verification of the functions and data of the website application. The business stakeholders of this system also required some changes in the system user interfaces and functionalities, which were also managed, and then the application was deployed after testing all of the functions and operations.

Criticize other development models

            In this section, it is criticized for other software development models like software development life cycle, waterfall software development methodology, incremental or iterative development, spiral model, and other models. The waterfall software development model and other software development models are not used in the development of the iLearn system because they do not allow the development team to make amendments to the components. The amendment will only be made in the website application when it will be completed. Another reason for not using these development models that they can take a lot of time to complete the project and can be very expensive. Only the development of these models is very costly and if the client asks to make changes in the modules then it can go out of his budget. These models do not allow any addition in the development lifecycle until it is completed. Therefore, the development team cannot start work on the other component or next phase until the previous phases will be completed and it is also a major reason to criticize the waterfall model.

Five use cases for the case study

The use case for a signup, login, and logout

The use case for class management, deliver a lecture and attend a lecture

Use case of Sharing notices and memos

Use case of record management, video conferencing and uploading contents

The use case for edit profile, check attendance and create groups

Sequence diagrams for the case study

Analysis and reflections of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            After the development and implementation of iLearn system application, various performance issues, as well as ambiguities, can be seen such as taking more time for authentication, taking extra time to store data into the database, interruption in video calling, or videoconferencing, low quality of voice as well as security issues. In these cases, the system must be maintained. For the maintenance of the system, the company must hire some system engineers in the information technology team to provide maintenance support along with the information security manager to increase the security of the application. Some important rules and regulations are also applied to the iLearn system. some legislators and agencies are shaping the education for students nowadays by creating public policy. The online system for education is very innovative and beneficial for students but it also has some risks related to security. Some rules and regulations should also be created for the digital learning system and e-learning system to protect the data and the contents of institutes.

Conclusion of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

            It is concluded that it is discussed and analyzed the problem related to the development and requirement specification and requirement gathering which is essentially important for the development of the digital learning system named as iLearn System. The business stakeholders must have to communicate with the software development team to provide clear information and requirements for a better understanding of developers. There are many difficulties as well as problems in gathering and specifications of requirements because the educational stakeholders cannot communicate properly with the software development team because of a load of educational operations on them. iLearn system (digital learning system) development team identified the iLearn system must be an open system that could accommodate new features as well as the existing services. The system has three different types of modules or components that have their own different types of functions and functional requirements. The modules are System administration, course management, as well as student module. The non-functional requirements are associated and referred mostly to the background working of the system. The prototyping creation is a very effective method to verify and validate the requirements. The very first risk is the monetary risk because the money can be wasted if it will not give positive results. For the development of the software development process, the agile software development model is selected with story card requirements. The waterfall software development model and other software development models are not used in the development of the iLearn system because they do not allow the development team to make amendments to the components.

References of Level of detail in Problem Analysis & Requirement Specification

Alharthi, A. D., Spichkova, M., & Hamilton, M. (2015). Requirements engineering aspects of elearning systems. . In Proceedings of the ASWEC 2015 24th Australasian Software Engineering Conference, 132-133.

Aundhe, M. D., & Mathew, S. K. (2009). Risks in offshore IT outsourcing: A service provider perspective. European Management Journal, 418-428.

Rees, M. J. (2002). A feasible user story tool for agile software development? In Ninth Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, 22-30.