Question

A small appliances rental company in CT has several branches. It is renting TVs and other small home appliances to its customers. New appliances are recorded in the system before they are offered for rent. The first time a customer rents an item she/he needs to provide the necessary personal and payment card details. A deposit equal to the double amount of the estimated total of the rental bill (including insurance premium for possible damage) is charged to the card on the first day of a rental. Upon return of the appliance the actual price for the rental is charged to the customer card and the deposit is returned to the customer. A text message to customers who are overdue for more than 3 days is generated every day. The current system is run on old standalone PCs that are not connected in a central system. The owner of the company requested a software expert to develop a new centralized system that keeps track of all rentals.

Task 1. Formulate only the section on business requirements (as part of the System Request document) for the new system. (0.7 p)

Task 2. If you are the project manager, explain to the owner of the company why you will be using a Gantt chart in the management of the new project. Explain also why you will be using a PERT chart in the management of the new project. (0.7p)

Answer 1

Here we are going to use the event decomposition technique. First we will find and categories the all relevant events and then find the list of use cases.

list of events:

1. New appliances are recorded in the system.

2. The personal and payment card details are stored of first timer/new customer.

3. customer deposit the rental bill(double amount+insurance premium) through card.

4. Customer return the appliances .

5. Initial deposit amount returned to customer.

6. The actual price for the rental is charged to the customer card.

7. Find the details of appliances with customer rented over 3 days and more.

8. A text message to customers who are overdue for more than 3 days is generated every day.

Now we will find the external & temporal events:

external event:

3. customer deposit the rental bill(double amount+insurance premium) through card.

5. Initial deposit amount returned to customer.

6. The actual price for the rental is charged to the customer card.

8. A text message to customers who are overdue for more than 3 days is generated every day.

temporal events:

1. New appliances are recorded in the system.

2. The personal and payment card details are stored of first timer/new customer.

4. Customer return the appliances .

7. Find the details of appliances with customer rented over 3 days and more.

Detailed Explanation:

Where is a potential communication between actor we need a use case, they are given bellow:

1. New appliances are recorded in the system before they are offered for rent.

2.  The first time a customer rents an item she/he needs to provide the necessary personal and payment card details.

3. Bill generation , deposit returned & actual rent charged.

4. A text message to customers who are overdue for more than 3 days is generated every day.

Task 2:

2.a. Necessity of Gantt Chart:

This project essentially consists of several subcomponents which needs to be assigned to different small teams of appropriate size for successful implementation of the project and the coordination and collaboration of the teams and their respective progresses on the project need to be monitored regularly so that all their activities are synchronised and move harmoniously towards the common deadline for the project. Therefore, the use of Gantt Chart will be of immense use to monitor and control the progress of the different teams towards a common deadline and to avoid bottlenecks and deadlocks.

2.b. Necessity of PERT :

This project requires existing data for successfully retrieved from several standalone pcs and fed into the new centralised system which itself consists of several sub-components and thus the use of PERT will be of major help in order to ease out the  scheduling and coordination of team members in accomplishing the entire work.