Question

Problem Description Students in Computer Information Systems (CIS) department at a local university are required to do some group-projects in their classes because their instructors believe the skills and competence to work as an effective team are important to assure a successful IT project. Group project helps IT students apply system design knowledge, solve real world business problems, enhance learning effective team skills, improve students’ business communication skills, and serve back to the community. In order to ensure an effective and functional group, each group has 3-4 members and a team leader is elected. The team makes a project plan based on the project activities. The team communication format is also decided. During the semester, students are asked to do multiple self- and peer- assessment based on the provided rubrics. The rubrics for the self- and peer assessment were developed based on previous studies and department faculty brain-storming. The primary focus of self- and peer- assessment is on the learning process of team skills. It should be used to enhancing team skill development. It can also be used as a reference or supplementary documents when faculty evaluates the final project. Nevertheless, due to the current paper-based instrument and manual process of administering the assessment, collecting the forms, data re-entry, calculation, and analysis, it is tedious and time-consuming for faculty members to implement the assessment, and it is difficulty for students to get an instant feedback from previous stage to improve their group performance. To address this issue, Dr. Larry Henson, a software engineering professor, decides to ask his students to design an online tool that can collect group peer evaluation data, do analysis, and generate reports. To have a better understanding of the functions and requirements of the peer-evaluation system, the faculty in the department had a meeting. Following is a summary of the meeting minutes. FacA: The system should allow Faculty assign students to different project teams. The same student in different class may participate in different project teams. FacB: The system should allow users to login with different roles such as faculty, students, and administrator. FacC: The system should allow a Faculty manages project teams for each class the faculty is teaching. FacD: The system may also be adopted by faculty in other departments as well as CIS faculty because some program core courses are offered by other departments. It is good to specify a system administrator. The administrator can manage faculty, classes, students, and rubric information. FacE: Students can do both self- and team-based peer assessments based on the specified rubrics. FacF: Students are allowed to view the assessment done by the team members so that they get instant feedback to improve their performance. FacG: The assessment should include both close-ended and open-ended questions. For instance, students are allowed to make comments upon assessing other team members FacH: The system should automatically generate different reports such as the average at the level of individual, team, and class. FacI: Students are also allowed to make comments upon assessments were done by other members. FacJ: All students comments should be reviewed and approved before exposed to other members. Understand the problem and define the scope of the project by 1) Identify functional requirements; 2) Identify domain classes and do domain model; 3) create a glossary or dictionary of the domain objects and give definition for each of them.

Answer 1

Hi,

Interesting Question; and a lengthy one to answer. I might be able to answer it partially due to limited time but will try giving best possible perspective. The question is mainly a Business Analyst Job work. You are creating a new software and collecting all the functional requirements and limitation.

The software Goal: Create a platform/system that helps in assessment/analysis/reporting of student projects.

Most of the Functional requirement is covered by the faulty meeting. However, lets go through them one by one and see how it fits into whole design.

1. As students are submitting their projects to Instructor/faculty, there are three class for sure : Student, Faculty, Project. There should be a database for all. There is a system administrator also.
2. Students can be part of more than one projects and many students are part of a project. So it’s a many to many relationship. A faculty assigns a project to a student.
3. There is a login system in place. So there are users. A user is no one but either student, a faculty or system admin.
4. A faculty can manage more than one project teams. Project teams are nothing but a group of students. But a project can have only one manager and a faculty manages the project.
5. The role of the system administrator was not clear from the problem. I assume that he is more like someone able to access anything and has permission to modify anything.

Summarizing all, the below ER diagram show the domain classes and their relationship

There is some scope for enhancement.

1. The class can be another entity and students are part of a class and a faculty teaches a class.
2. Each class can have many sections and a student can be part of only one section of the class.
3. There can be a relationship of projects to classes.

Well this is surely not the final solution but the approach is to start this way and now improve. Try to accommodation the requirements one by one. I hope you get a starting point with this answer and are able to think how to improve it. I am sure you will be able to come up with much better solution at the end.

Hope it Helps.