About Australian Fashion Designs
Australian Fashion Designs (AFD) is one business company that is found in Australia where it has main office in the Brisbane city and others two branches in Melbourne and Sydney and it mainly sell the cloths for the women , this company has allocated the various locations with some sales representatives that aids the selling of their products and stocking of the retails stores shops in their respective sales locations, the company usually sales the items to the retailers who operates the retails stores and the individual customers and those customers receives their products via the postal courier services.
Currently the management want a customer relationship system to be introduced where the customers will be able to place orders online at their convenience and also make the online payments which is more secure, the sales representatives will also use the application to check the retails shops stocks levels, then take more orders and also generate the sales area and sales persons sales reports.
The management want to know the best method of the agile and iterative system development methodologies to use in acquisition of the new proposed system since the agile and iterative methodologies are the systems developments methods are used by the system developers to ensure the system is developed in speedy and with high quality manner.
The below are some features that make it suitable.
- Flexible: – this methodology easily adapts to the changes that arises while developing the system.
- Speed in developments: – the methodology software is developed rapidly and iteratively till its release period (Longworth2012).
- Responsive: – the development method reacts to any arising changes that occur in the process of developing the system.
- Leaning nature: – the methodology ensures that the system is developed and delivered within a short time frame, with reduced cost and with improved system’s qualities.
- Learning nature: – the methodology also ensures that the system is improved in the entire course of initial and final software developments periods.
The figure above shows the scrum methodology and is one of the iterative and incremental agile software developments methodologies and is used in system development managements.
The method enables the development teams to work as one team to achieve the system development goals in a flexible and holistic manner (Downs 2011).
This methodology enables the development team and the stake holders have daily communication to check if any requirements change is required by the system owners.
- Development team is always independent in decision making.
- Requirements documents are irrelevant here.
- The systems developed are updated in a constant way.
- Disadvantages
- Not recommendable for any big project.
- Experts required must be possessing high qualifications.
- The development processes are affected by wavered costs.
- Methodology 2: Extreme Programming (XP)
- General discussion
The above figure is the extreme programming methodology which is part of agile software development methodologies and required in case some system functions will be avoided (Jain 2010).
In this method the system is developed following the top-notch approaches and the system is developed to the end without making any change to it and this reduces the development costs where system is continuously planed and tested throughout the development period.
Advantages
- The customers/clients are involved in system development processes.
- Plan and schedule processes that are rationalised are established.
- The development teams are fully committed to the software developments.
- Development teams are well equipped with modernised methodologies for system delivery.
Disadvantages
- The people that are involved influences and determines the effectiveness of the software developed.
- Very many developments meeting are required and tend to raise the costs of developments.
- Allot of changes are introduced in the system’s developments.
- The end systems results are not clearly known to developers.
Methodology 3: Dynamic System Development Model Methodology
The figure above is the dynamic system development methodology which is one of the agile system methodologies that uses iterative and incremental approach and mainly involve the system users in the entire software development processes.
This methodology ensures that the system is developed and delivered using the set time frames and the specified budget allocations and thus this fits the customers that has rigid budget and requires the system on time.
Advantages
- The users of system understand the processes involved in developing the system.
- System’s functions are delivered faster and quickly.
- End users are allowed to access the system by help of the development team.
Disadvantages
- It is quite expensive to implement this methodology.
- It is not recommended for small sized organizations.
Methodology 4: Feature Driven Development
General discussion
The figure above is the feature driven development methodology that is part of the agile and iterative software development methodologies and it is used in case a large team of developers will be involved in developing the application system where the object –oriented technology is used (Laplante 2013).
This method is therefore used by many systems development teams to develop nay type of system that is large and complex in nature.
Advantages
- It moves large projects in a continuous and successful way to completion.
- The system is delivered using only five simplified procedures.
- The system is developed using pre set and pre-programmed software’s standards to ease system developments.
Disadvantages
- It is not recommendable for smaller projects or single developers.
- It relies on leading system’s developers and therefore complete it requires a complete system structure is required.
- The system owners are not provided with system documentations (Karumanchi 2012).
Recommendation
In the system acquisition using the agile and iterative method I recommend use of the extreme programming methodology because all the stakeholders of the systems are involved especially the customers and they are allowed to propose some system changes in the system development process.
Reference
Karumanchi,N.(2012) Peeling Design Patterns: For Beginners and Interviews.5th edn.New York:CareerMonk Publications.
Laplante,P.(2013) Real-Time Systems Design and Analysis: Tools for the Practitioner.2nd edn.New Jersey:Wiley.
Jain,S.(2010) A Level Made Simple Structured System Analysis and Design.2nd edn.New Delhi:Bpb Publications.
Downs, E.(2011) Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method: Applications and Context. 2nd edn. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Longworth, G.(2012) Introducing Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method .4th edn. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers.