SYD300 Systems Development Methodologies

Assignment 3 marksheets

Clare — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:39:42 +0000

Just to let you know that I have now shared your marksheet for Assignment 3 with you. Please let me know as soon as possible if you have problems accessing it and I will resend it as an email.

Many thanks for a great course – I shall miss our debates!

All the best for next semester

Weds June 15

Clare — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:29:29 +0000

As you know the plan for today’s class was for you to work on your assignment while I would be in my office to offer any ‘drop in’ assistance that you needed. Unfortunately, due to an unforseen access problem I am not going to be able to get to campus this afternoon – however, I will be online (email, gmail chat, fb and skype) and if you need anything please make contact. If online is not the best way to talk over the ideas or questions you have I am happy to make a time to meet with you on Friday (or early next week instead).

I am very sorry for my absence from campus but hopefully I can still answer your queries :)

Wiki work

Clare — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:07:18 +0000

Hello SYDers – In class today I want us to have a look at the info you have put into the wiki and watch any videos that you think are useful in explaining the concepts in the various methodologies. So come along prepared to talk us through the main ideas that you have come across and to highlight anything that you think might be useful – I will try to add value to the discussions too

Following that I am happy to answer any questions regarding Assignment 3 and to give you time to work away on the assignment. I will be there as a resource for you!

Kickoff Meetings

Clare — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:18:40 +0000

Today I am going to spend a small amount of time looking at what is meant by a Kickoff Meeting and looking at some of the things that get discussed and decided in them. I am going to suggest that you then hold a Kickoff meeting using the assignment scenario as your ‘project’. I will suggest some roles for you!

For the last hour I thought it would be a good idea to have another dive into Second Life and do a simple building class – it will give you more of a feel for the kinds of things that are possible in the assignment project scenario.

Class May 18th

Clare — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:56:31 +0000

Joel has just reminded me that it is the : Ingram-Micro Guest Speakers on Wednesday 12noon-2pm A211 –>future & dev of storage & servers/processors and that overlaps with our class. I know that he wishes to attend the speaker and I am guessing that others of you would like to as well. Therefore just for tomorrow

CLASS WILL START AT 2PM (not 1pm)

See you then

Wikis, Second Life and Assignment 3

Clare — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:07:04 +0000

Lots of new stuff today as I want to start setting up what you need to tackle Assignment 3 which is now available on NMIT Online. I am not going to talk through the assignment this week, I will leave that for next week but it would be helpful if you could find the time to have a read through before then.

I want to introduce you to the idea of a wiki to capture the class learning – the one from 2010 and 2009 is here and I have set up a new one for 2011 which is here. You will need to request access to the 2011 wiki in order to have edit rights on it but you should be able to read both with no problem.

I realise that one thing we haven’t really talked about are the different elements that a methodology probably needs to have in order to be useful to us – we will talk about that today. We will also spend some time in Second Life looking at some basic building to give you a flavour of what creating a Second Life “build” or application entails.

While I was thinking about the elements we need in a methodology, I came across this presentation on methodologies which summarises quite a lot of things we have talked about and also this useful tutorial.

The document we created in class on methodology elements is here.

Softly softly…..

Clare — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:45:46 +0000

As we move away from looking at the more traditional forms of systems development, I want to introduce a method that although not strictly a systems development methodology as such, is incredibly useful for helping us to understand a ‘mess’. It enables us to take a broad, informal view of a situation or an organisation and assist us to identify where problems might occur (or be occurring) and where intervention might be valuable. It helps us to see where and what ’problems’ might exist which allows us to use more conventional methods to build appropriate systems.

I am referring to Soft Systems Methodology, and in particular the technique of creating Rich Pictures – that is what we will be doing this afternoon!

Strengths and weaknesses!

Clare — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:23:45 +0000

First of all apologies as I am still unwell and will not make it to class this afternoon.

However, I have put together some notes for you on the areas I had intended to cover this afternoon and which I hope you will find useful for your assignment. There is a lot of information on the web about the strengths and weaknesses of the SDLC and I would encourage you to spend a bit of time searching for it and having a read. However you might find it useful to look through my notes here to get you started. I have included a little reminder of what we were talking about over the last couple of weeks and ended with a few hints for tackling Assignment 2. I will be very happy to go over these with you next week but I don’t want to spend all of the session doing that. In other words please use class time today to have a good search/read and think about the issues mentioned in the notes.

You will notice in the notes that I use SSADM as an example of the traditional SDLC and I am mainly referring to the early versions of this methodology. SSADM 6 is the current version I think and it has evolved somewhat from its early roots. However, it is still very ‘document intensive’ and many, if not all, of the strengths and weakness which I mention in the notes still apply.

Systems and Systems Thinking

Clare — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:46:30 +0000

After some fun with metaphors last week, we turn our minds to systems this week! We are gradually getting closer to the core of the course by bringing together some of the contextual thinking we have already done and seeing how it impacts on our view of systems. In particular, look out for how we can integrate the puzzle/problem/mess concept to systems development!

Looking forward to seeing you all shortly

Metaphors

Clare — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 03:27:24 +0000

I mentioned metaphors a couple of times today particular in relation to the idea of IS development being seen as a ‘problem-solving’ activity and next week I want to explore metaphors a little and why they are so important to us in IT.

Right at the end of class I asked you to do a couple of things before next week – Find out what a metaphor is and then find a couple of good examples of metaphors that we use frequently, preferably in areas other than IT.