Systems Development Essentials

Course Overview

Systems Development Essentials provides Business Analysts with a good grounding in systems investigation and quality assurance - the underpinning of successful systems development. The course examines the fundamental differences between object-oriented and structured systems development and differentiates between generic lifecycle types, methods and approaches. Key areas such as designing test cases for the requirements, identifying different architectures for system development solutions and how CASE tools can be used to support the method selected are explored.

Holders of the ISEB Certificate in Systems Development Essentials should be able to:

• Identify the tasks and disciplines required for systems development and implementation.
• Investigate a system
• Interpret business requirements and produce systems requirements
• Quality assure the systems requirements documentation
• Design test cases for the requirements
• Describe the commonly-used development lifecycles defined in the syllabus.
• Describe in detail one methodology that embraces one (or more) of these lifecycles
• Describe the structure and activities of this methodology
• Describe, interpret and quality assure the key models that the selected methodology uses for defining the process, static and event perspectives of the system
• Make effective use of different methods of interpersonal communications.
• Quality assure the systems requirements documentation
• Identify different architectures for systems development solutions
• Conduct a system review
• Explain how CASE tools might be used to support the method

Exams may be taken either at the end of the course or, if the candidate wishes time for additional study, at a later date.

Course Syllabus

1. Roles in systems development
   • The purpose, objectives and tasks of systems development
   • Roles and actors in systems development
   • Technical and interpersonal skills of the analysts
   • The emergence of skills frameworks (SFIA+)
   • The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
2. Systems architecture
   • Enterprise, systems and infrastructure levels of architecture
   • The Zachman Framework
   • Inputs at an enterprise level (EAP)
   • Inputs at system and infrastructure level
   • Components of an EAP methodology
3. Development approaches
   • Bespoke development
   • Commercial off the shelf (COTS) software package solutions
   • Configuring and customising COTS software package solutions
   • Component-based systems development
   • Service-based systems development
4. Systems development lifecycles
   • Waterfall model
   • V model
   • Incremental model
   • Spiral model
   • Advantages and disadvantages of each approach
   • Selection of an appropriate approach
5. Methodologies
   • Traditional and structured approaches
   • Agile Development / Rapid Application Development / eXtreme Programming
   • The Unified Process (UP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
   • Models of the UML
   • Interpretation of
   • Use case diagram
   • Use case description
   • Class diagram
   • Sequence diagram
   • Phases of the Unified Process
   • Workflows of the Unified Process
6. Systems Investigation
   • Fact finding approaches:
   • Workshops
   • Prototyping
   • Interviewing
   • Questionnaires
   • Scenario analysis
   • Other approaches
   • Functional requirements definition
   • Non-functional requirements definition
   • Documenting requirements
   • Human aspects of systems investigation and introducing change
7. Systems design, implementation and maintenance
   • Aspects of the production environment
   • Design principles and constraints (legal, ethical, financial)
   • The tasks of implementation
   • Sign off and hand over
   • Post-implementation reviews
   • Different types of maintenance
8. Quality Assurance
   • Definitions of software quality
   • The V model
   • Requirements-driven testing
   • Static Testing: types of walkthrough and inspection
   • Post-project reviews
   • Service Level Agreements
9. CASE and CAST tools
   • Features of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Computer Aided Software Testing (CAST) tools
   • Life-cycle coverage
   • Requirements traceability
   • Advantages and disadvantages