Stakeholders of information system

• A stakeholder is anybody who can affect or is affected by an organization, strategy or project. They
can be internal or external and they can be at senior or junior levels.
 • Introduction to analysis and design tools

Software analysis and design includes all activities, which help the transformation of requirement
specification into implementation. Requirement specifications specify all functional and non-functional
expectations from the software. These requirement specifications come in the shape of human readable and
understandable documents, to which a computer has nothing to do.
Software analysis and design is the intermediate stage, which helps human-readable requirements to be transformed
into actual code.
Let us see few analysis and design tools used by software designers:

Data Flow Diagram

Data flow diagram is graphical representation of flow of data in an information system. It is capable of depicting incoming data
flow, outgoing data flow and stored data. The DFD does not mention anything about how data flows through the system.
There is a prominent difference between DFD and Flowchart. The flowchart depicts flow of control in program modules. DFDs
depict flow of data in the system at various levels. DFD does not contain any control or branch elements.

Types of DFD
Data Flow Diagrams are either Logical or Physical.

• Logical DFD - This type of DFD concentrates on the system process, and flow of data in the system.For example in a
Banking software system, how data is moved between different entities.
• Physical DFD - This type of DFD shows how the data flow is actually implemented in the system. It is more specific and
close to the implementation.

DFD Components
DFD can represent Source, destination, storage and flow of data using the following set of components -

• Entities - Entities are source and destination of information data. Entities are represented by a
rectangles with their respective names.
• Process - Activities and action taken on the data are represented by Circle or Round-edged
rectangles.
 • Data Storage - There are two variants of data storage - it can either be represented as a rectangle
with absence of both smaller sides or as an open-sided rectangle with only one side missing.
• Data Flow - Movement of data is shown by pointed arrows. Data movement is shown from the
base of arrow as its source towards head of the arrow as destination.

Levels of DFD

• Level 0 - Highest abstraction level DFD is known as Level 0 DFD, which depicts the entire
information system as one diagram concealing all the underlying details. Level 0 DFDs are also
known as context level DFDs.
• Level 1 - The Level 0 DFD is broken down into more specific, Level 1 DFD. Level 1 DFD depicts
basic modules in the system and flow of data among various modules. Level 1 DFD also mentions
basic processes and sources of information.

• Level 2 - At this level, DFD shows how data flows inside the modules mentioned in Level 1.

• Higher level DFDs can be transformed into more specific lower level DFDs with deeper level of
understanding unless the desired level of specification is achieved.

Structured English

Most programmers are unaware of the large picture of software so they only rely on what their managers
tell them to do. It is the responsibility of higher software management to provide accurate information to
the programmers to develop accurate yet fast code.
Other forms of methods, which use graphs or diagrams, may are sometimes interpreted differently by
different people.
Hence, analysts and designers of the software come up with tools such as Structured English. It is nothing
but the description of what is required to code and how to code it. Structured English helps the programmer
to write error-free code.
Other form of methods, which use graphs or diagrams, may are sometimes interpreted differently by
different people. Here, both Structured English and Pseudo-Code tries to mitigate that understanding gap.

Structured English is the It uses plain English words in structured programming paradigm. It is not the
ultimate code but a kind of description what is required to code and how to code it. The following are some
tokens of structured programming.
IF-THEN-ELSE,
DO-WHILE-UNTIL
Analyst uses the same variable and data name, which are stored in Data Dictionary, making it much simpler
to write and understand the code.

Example
We take the same example of Customer Authentication in the online shopping environment. This procedure
to authenticate customer can be written in Structured English as:

Entity-Relationship Model
Entity-Relationship model is a type of database model based on the notion of real world entities and
relationship among them. We can map real world scenario onto ER database model. ER Model creates a
set of entities with their attributes, a set of constraints and relation among them.
ER Model is best used for the conceptual design of database. ER Model can be represented as follows :

• Entity - An entity in ER Model is a real world being, which has some properties called attributes.
Every attribute is defined by its corresponding set of values, called domain.

• For example, Consider a school database. Here, a student is an entity. Student has various attributes
like name, id, age and class etc.

• Relationship - The logical association among entities is called relationship. Relationships are
mapped with entities in various ways. Mapping cardinalities define the number of associations
between two entities.
 • Mapping cardinalities: one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many

Decision Table

Data Dictionary
Data dictionary is the centralized collection of information about data. It stores meaning and origin of data,
its relationship with other data, data format for usage etc. Data dictionary has rigorous definitions of all
names in order to facilitate user and software designers.
Data dictionary is often referenced as meta-data (data about data) repository. It is created along with DFD
(Data Flow Diagram) model of software program and is expected to be updated whenever DFD is changed
or updated.

Requirement of Data Dictionary

Contents
Data dictionary should contain information about the following

• Data Flow
• Data Structure
• Data Elements
• Data Stores
• Data Processing
Data Flow is described by means of DFDs as studied earlier and represented in algebraic form as described.

= Composed of

{} Repetition
() Optional
+ And
[/] Or

Example
Address = House No + (Street / Area) + City + State
Course ID = Course Number + Course Name + Course Level + Course Grades

Data Elements
Data elements consist of Name and descriptions of Data and Control Items, Internal or External data stores
etc. with the following details:
 • Primary Name
• Secondary Name (Alias)
• Use-case (How and where to use)
• Content Description (Notation etc. )
• Supplementary Information (preset values, constraints etc.)

Data Store
It stores the information from where the data enters into the system and exists out of the system. The Data
Store may include -

• Files
o Internal to software.
o External to software but on the same machine.
o External to software and system, located on different machine.
• Tables
o Naming convention
o Indexing property

Data Processing
There are two types of Data Processing:

• Logical: As user sees it

Structure Charts

Structure chart is a chart derived from Data Flow Diagram. It represents the system in more detail than DFD.
It breaks down the entire system into lowest functional modules, describes functions and sub-functions of
each module of the system to a greater detail than DFD.
Structure chart represents hierarchical structure of modules. At each layer a specific task is performed.
Here are the symbols used in construction of structure charts -
Pseudo-Code
Pseudo code is written more close to programming language. It may be considered as augmented
programming language, full of comments and descriptions.
Pseudo code avoids variable declaration but they are written using some actual programming language’s
constructs, like C, Fortran, Pascal etc.
Pseudo code contains more programming details than Structured English. It provides a method to perform
the task, as if a computer is executing the code. Example
Program to print Fibonacci up to n numbers.

DECISION TABLE......???