Introduction: Ice Breaker
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
What is your job title and organization?
What are you really good at?
What is your biggest personal accomplishment thus
far?
What is your primary expectation for this class?
What is your guilty pleasure (i.e., something that
makes you please although you may feel guilty
about it)?
S556 SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
& DESIGN
Week 1
Exploring Requirements (Gause &
Weinberg, 1989)

5 teams were given the same requirement for a
computer program except for a single sentence:
Team A: complete the job with the fewest possible hours of
programming
 Team B: minimize the number of program statements written
 Team C: minimize the amount of memory used
 Team D: produce the clearest possible program
 Team E: to produce the clearest possible output

Exploring Requirements (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)
Primary Objective
Best Team
Minimize core storage
C
Maximize output
readability
Maximize program
readability
Minimize statements
E
Minimize programming
hours
D
B, C
A
Exploring Requirements (Gause &
Weinberg, 1989)


If you tell what you want, you’re quite likely to
get it
Simple, but difficult task!
Boehm’s Observations on Project Cost
Cost
1000
High cost
Low cost
50
Analysis Design
Development
Implementation
Primary Concepts in SA&D
Understand organizational issues
 Understand the users
 Understand the problems

Understand Organizational Issues

Do not jump into the development stage when
asked to build an information system
 e.g.,

Social Networking Site
Analyze organizational issues
 e.g.,
culture, organizational structures
Understand the Users

Contextual design: gathering data, datadriven design, the management team, and
organizational context
Understand the Problems
Once an information system would be a
solution, analyze what kind of system they
would need
 Define the problems in organizations
(assignment #1)
 Avoid ambiguity in stating requirements

Understand Design Representations
(Saddler, 2001)

A “design” lives only in our heads and in our
representations until it’s became in its final
form, such as software, hardware, print, or
another medium
Understand Design Representations
(Saddler, 2001)

If you have an idea about a design of a next
new smartphone, what’s the appropriate form
of representation for that idea?
Understand Design Representations
(Saddler, 2001)

Representational form:
 Conversations
 Proposals
and plans
 Sketches
 Symbolic
and schematic
 Scenarios and storyboards
 Prototypes
Understand Design Representations
(Saddler, 2001)

Roles that representations play:
 Specification
 Making
ideas and intentions tangible
 Making ideas manipulable
 Involving multiple ways of thinking—verbal, visual,
symbolic, & emotional
 Limiting the issues
 Summarizing design decisions
Sequence Model
Exercise on Convergent Design
Getting the Ambiguity Out (Gause &
Weinberg, 1989)

Convergent design = a design process that
consciously and visibly recognizes, defines, and
removes ambiguity as effectively as possible
Examples of Ambiguity

Create a means for protecting a small group
of human beings from the hostile elements of
their environment
Examples of Ambiguity
Examples of Ambiguity
Examples of Ambiguity
Convergent Design Exercise (Gause &
Weinberg, 1989)
You need to work independently
 Privately writing your best estimate so as to
make a firm commitment, and capturing your
first impressions, so you won’t forget them when
you hear other opinions

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

Question 1:
 How
many points were in the star that was used as
a focus slide for this presentation?
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

The 100 participants provided 18 different answers
75
0-2
5-9
10-12
13-16 17-20 21-24 25-2728-32Over infinite
32
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

Question 2:
 What
factors do you think are responsible for the
differences among answers?
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)
Observational & recall errors
 Interpretation errors
 Mixtures of sources of error
 Effects of human interaction

Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

The second poll
75
0-2
5-9
10-12 13-16
17-20 21-24 25-27 28-32Over
32
infinite
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

The second poll
75
0-2
5-9
10-12 13-16
17-20 21-24 25-27 28-32Over
32
infinite
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

Question 3:
 Write
down, verbatim to the best of your recall
ability, the question that you think you answered in
question 1
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)

Question 4:
 Write
down the variants to the question that you
think the other classmates wrote when they were
asked to recall the question that they thought they
were answering
Convergent Design (Gause &
Weinberg, 1989)

From this exercise, what did you learn? And
how is it relevant to systems analysis & design?
Convergent Design (Gause & Weinberg,
1989)


Each variant statement of this relatively trivial
problem does produce a different way of
looking at the problem, which in turn produces
a different solution.
Our problem statements must be precise