ICT501 Business Analysis and Systems Development Approaches

Assignment 1 - Report

Worth: 20%

Note: This assignment is an INDIVIDUAL assignment – it cannot be done in groups

Submission instructions: You should Submit Your Assignmentwork via the ICT393 LMS site. You can receive email notification that your assignment has been received. Late submissions will be penalised at the rate of 5 marks per day late or part thereof unless prior approval for an extension has been gained.

You should submit the report as a word-processed document and ensure that you include your name in the document. You must keep a copy of the final version of your submission and be prepared to provide it on request.

The University treats plagiarism, collusion, theft of other students’ work and other forms of dishonesty in assessment seriously. For guidelines on honesty in assessment including avoiding plagiarism see http://our.murdoch.edu.au/Educational-technologies/Academic-integrity/

Background

You should consider yourself to be an employee of a consulting firm called Innovative Solutions that specialises in systems analysis, design, and development services. The firm’s services range from advising other organisations of how they can meet their own needs for system development through to providing direct development services. The clients of your firm range from very small businesses of only a few employees with very little in-house expertise, to large organisations with large in-house IT departments. Client organisations not only vary widely in terms of size, but also in terms of type of business, financial resources, IT infrastructure, and organisational culture. The required timeframe for developing and implementing a proposed system will also vary depending on both internal and external environmental factors.

There are a wide variety of possible approaches to the development of systems. These vary considerably in terms of factors such as whether they are:

• Sequential versus iterative
• Model driven versus product driven
• Prescriptive versus adaptive
• Proprietary versus in-house

Different approaches are suited to different types of projects in different types of organisations. Innovative Solutions has expertise in two system development methodologies: Rational Unified Process and Scrum.

In this assignment you will write a business report for employees of Innovative Solutions to use when selecting the optimal approach development approach for clients. You will investigate what factors should be considered when deciding which development methodology to use to support development in a particular project, and present your findings in the form of a series of guidelines. The report will act as a guide for other consultants to use when selecting the optimal systems development methodology for a particular client.

To do

To successfully complete the assignment, you should:

• Identify factors that may determine the appropriateness of a particular development approach for an organisation or project – for example organisational size, team size and whether the system is mission-critical may be important. Use the unit readings and other literature you identify to do this.
• Review the system development methodologies that Innovative Solutions use in terms of their characteristics, benefits and drawbacks:
  • Rational Unified Process
• Consider when the use of each methodology is appropriate.
• Propose guidelines to help assist in the selection of which of these system development methodologies to use.
• Create a report based on what you have found out. It should include some information about the factors that determine choice of methodology, some information about the methodologies, and MUST provide well explained guidelines. The report will be used by employees of the Innovative Solutions, so should be written in a style that will be accessible to them (i.e. not as an academic essay).

Format Guidelines

1. Your report should be written in language suitable for IT professionals to understand.
2. Your report should be around 1500 words in length.
3. Your report should have the following structure to ensure that it presents the information in a logical and useful way:

• Title page, with a title that clearly reflects its contents.
• Table of contents. This should be generated using the Word Table of Contents feature.
• This should include the purpose of the report.
• Overview of Rational Unified Process. This section should be brief as your colleagues already know about this methodology.
• Overview of Scrum. This section should be brief as your colleagues already know about this methodology.
• Comparison of Rational Unified Process and Scrum.
• This section should provide explicit guidance that will help your colleagues to choose between the methodologies based on the factors you have identified and considered.
• This should list all the resources you consulted in writing the report. These should be presented using APA referencing style. Your report should also include citations when you directly quote facts you have obtained from sources– but it is not intended to be an academic essay and should primarily be your ideas and recommendations. See http://libguides.murdoch.edu.au/APA/ for information about how to present your bibliography.

NOTE: Plagiarism is not acceptable. Urkund will be used to report on potential plagiarism. Find out more about how to reference properly and avoid plagiarism at
http://our.murdoch.edu.au/Student-life/Assignment-successfully/Referencing-and-citing/

This table indicates the overall distribution of marks. Use it as a checklist when planning and editing your report: