Building A Database To Track Students – Northern Beaches TAFE

Clarifying user needs

This report presents a discussion on the design and development of the system to be implemented by IT section of Northern Beaches TAFE. The system is a database system that will be used to track students so as to provide information to students about the different courses offered. The report shows the various stages involved in the gathering of requirements by designing questions to be addressed to the client to conducting a feasibility study of the system and to designing of the database and also shows a sample implementation of a program accessing and manipulating the database.

2 Clarifying user needs

To clarify user needs, the following questions will be addressed to the client;

1. What is the current system that is being used to track the students and how is it being used?
2. What problems arise from the current system in tracking the students?
3. How do you recommend the problems arising from question two above can be solved?
4. What information about the students would you like the new database to capture
5. What information about enrollment would you like the new database to capture?
6. What information about enquiries would you like the new database to capture?
7. What information about courses would you like the new database to capture?
8. How many users are expected to use the new system?
9. Will the system be accessible outside the school premises?
10. What are your expectations for the new system?

3 Feasibility

Feasibility study involves conducting analysis of the system to determine whether the new system is viable for implementation or not. Feasibility study analyses the likelihood of completion of the project successfully. To conduct the feasibility study, it’s important to determine the objective, scope and boundary of the project.

3.1 Objective

The objective of the project is to build a database that is capable of tracking students in order to keep them informed about the different course offerings. The database should be accessible by the specified users through an interface.

3.2 Scope

The scope of the system is a crucial part of the project planning in which a list of the goals, deliverables, tasks, costs and deadlines are determined and documented.

The goal of the proposed system is to track students so as to keep them informed of the available course offering and to track graduating students so as to analyse employment trends. The system should be delivered as a working database which is accessible through an interface. To develop the system, a database will be designed and implemented and then an interface will be created. The front end will be used to access and manipulate the database.

3.3 Hardware and software recommendations

The recommended hardware is based on the type of software that the project will run on. To determine the hardware setup for the project, we need to determine the software recommendations.

For the software, the project will run on Windows operating system platform. This is the recommended platform because the system is expected to run on Microsoft Access database. The reason for selecting Microsoft Access is that to the continued support by Microsoft. Microsoft Access is also easy to use to create the system thus it will take less time thus the project will be able to meet the schedule.

Based on the software requirements specified above, the hardware requirements for the system are; Desktop or laptop computer with the following specifications; 5^th generation and above Intel processors for example Intel Core i3, i5, i7 or i9 with 4GB memory and 250 GB Disk space HDD or SSD. SSD is recommended as the computer will be faster thus giving the user a good experience while using the system.

3.5 Validation rules

To validate the system the following rules will be followed;

• The user should be able to add a student by filling a form with the appropriate student details
• The user should be able to record an enquiry made by a student
• The user should be able to enroll a student to a certain course.
• The user should be able to record students who have graduated.
• The user should be able to record sessions.

3.2 Data dictionary

3.3 Front end implementation

The following interfaces shows the front end implementation of the system. The interfaces are used to access and manipulate the database by adding or updating records.

• Add course

3.4 Security recommendations

To ensure the system is secure, some security measures will have to be implemented to prevent unauthorized access so as to safeguard the data in the database. Accessing the system will be doen usng user roles where by different users will be given different user roles that restrict them from accessing certain parts of the system while giving them access to the specific parts of the system that they are supposed to access. To make sure unauthorized users should not access the system each user will have to access the system using a strong password. A strong password will consist of alphanumeric characters.

3.5 Backup requirements

Backup is crucial for all systems to guarantee continued operation in case of a system crash that may lead to loss of data. For the proposed system, regular backups will have to be made. The database administrator in charge of making and maintaining backups will be required to make a backup every day. The reason for recommending daily backups is that in case of a system crush the database administrator can restore the system to the state it was before the system crash happened thus the users will continue from where they left off the previous day.

4 Conclusion

If the proposed system is implemented, it will make work easier for the instution as they will be able to add and manipulate records in the database with ease. The new system will also make it easy to generate reports that will be useful to the organization.

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