[absynthe]

I'm not really sure where the best place to post this is but I wanted to get it out there for some ideas from you guys. I'm getting ready to start a project in my Software Engineering class and I've been assigned the role of Analyst. I will be contacting the "company" to begin the process. If Im remembering my System Analysis class correctly I need to come up with some good questions to ask the "company" in order to start with the diagrams and flow charts prior to coding. The program will be developed in Java and use Oracle.

If any of you have any ideas for some good questions to pose that will help me brainstorm this thing it will help me SO MUCH. Also if any of you have anything to add to help define my role with any prior experience I would love any input there too.

Im wanting to try and cover all possible issues with the initial meeting to ease the process of structuring this thing out. This is the entire proposal. This is all I was given:

Quote

February 03, 2009

TO: Association of Young Entrepreneurs Four-Star Winner
FR: LT&B
RE: RFP Pre-Announcement

Congratulations on your company receiving 4-stars in the most recent AYE-Ratings. Because of your company's superior rating, we are offering you the chance to be awarded one of our upcoming projects on a sole-source basis. Five other software firms with similar ratings will receive this same pre-notice and will be bidding also.

Please review the attached six projects and indicate your preference (most preferred = 1, 2, 3,... through least preferred= 6). You may be able to influence the project you are awarded by offering a discount against the 100 kUSD per project for one or more projects. [ITEC370 Note: A 5% discount means you can get no better than a 95% on your overall team project grade, so beware.]

We will award the six projects first to minimize our overall cost after discounts, and then by your numerical preference.

Project Deliverables
Each project requires you to submit for our review and acceptance the following:
1. Project proposal
2. Requirements document
3. Design document
4. Test plan
5. UI prototype
6. Fully-populated relational database
7. User reports (approx. 6)
8. Test results
9. Source code
10. Test code
11. User documentation
12. Meeting minutes
13. Complete Time Log by team member
14. Weekly Progress Reports
15. Up to 3 formal project presentations to our company personnel

Project Payments
Payments for each project are not to exceed 100 kUSD. [ITEC370 Note: 100kUSD = 100% overall team project grade] We will make pro-rated progress payments based on your delivery, and our acceptance, of the listed work products. For all of the projects, time is of the essence. You may propose, in advance, reducing the scope on some items, but late delivery or schedule slippage is not acceptable.

We reserve the right to permanently reduce payments for any and all late deliverables in the scope. We also reserve the right to permanently reduce any or all deliverable payments by up to 40% based on our evaluation of the deliverable's quality and completeness. No payment whatsoever will be made for un-submitted deliverables.

1.1. Your complete company name
1.2. Employees who will be assigned to the project
1.3. Who will fill, for the first phase, the roles of
1.3.1. Project manager- contact with our business team
1.3.2. Analyst- contact with our domain experts
1.3.3. QA- checks, controls, releases work products
1.3.4. Technical Lead- your internal technical expert
1.4. 7x24 contact info for above roles
1.5. Statement of team norms for how you will
1.5.1. communicate internally
1.5.2. make decisions
1.5.3. obtain consensus
1.5.4. report effort and progress
1.6. Ranked project preferences for all projects (and any discounts on offer)
1.6.1. TimeTrax
1.6.2. DOBRO Test Harness
1.6.3. Not-JIT
1.6.4. Scratch-2U SCM
1.6.5. SURAT
1.6.6. CapSim

Sincerely,

David
Carpe Aurum VC

And this is the actual project we won the bidding on:

Quote

CapSim
We have a single-step production process through which all our products must run. Subcomponents arrive to be processed with some variation in interarrival time. The time it takes them in processing also varies.
For each order, a customer provides a best finish time plus a penalty for finishing late and a penalty for finishing early. Given Java.class files to generate order arrivals with their associated properties, we need you to deliver a simulation tool that can calculate our long-term average cost over a large number of simulations under different scheduling policies., e.g. First-Come-First-Served vs. Earliest Due Date First.
We have an operations research consultant that will recommend policies. Your deliverable needs to be able to run and store in a database the detailed results of a large number of repetitions for each combination of conditions and associated cost parameters and policy info. You will also need to report statistics of interest for the simulations. e.g. fraction of late deliveries.
We need a simple GUI that will allow our capacity planners to change the number of machines in your and their properties (speed) to investigate factory improvement proposals that are desperately needed.

Thanks so much guys! I value so many of your opinions and so much of your input. You guys have lived doing this, I'm really just starting out and trying to get a jump start.

This post has been edited by absynthe: 04 February 2009 - 08:57 PM

[KYA]

What about the "Software Development" forum?

Also, I really hate hypotheticals/role playing in class. I've done way too much of it.

Ontopic:

Questions to ask:

What are you expectations for this project?
What role do you envision you [or your company] partaking of during this process?
How periodically do you want updates?
Are there any company policies in place that will prohibit our development of this product?
What is your current infrastructure?
And last, but not least, which is better: pickles or bacon?

[absynthe]

KYA, on 4 Feb, 2009 - 10:12 PM, said:

What about the "Software Development" forum?

Also, I really hate hypotheticals/role playing in class. I've done way too much of it.

Ontopic:

Questions to ask:

What are you expectations for this project?
What role do you envision you [or your company] partaking of during this process?
How periodically do you want updates?
Are there any company policies in place that will prohibit our development of this product?
What is your current infrastructure?
And last, but not least, which is better: pickles or bacon?

Awesome KYA!! Thank you!! If I would have posted it there all my friends here that I know and respect wouldn't have seen it! You guys are the ones I hope to get input from!

Please keep em coming, anything you guys have ideas on! I've done this once but had a different role, never the analyst and I would think if I screw up the project is f'd.

KYA your gift is in the mail

[no2pencil]

** Moved to software development **

Unless you want the lounge style attention, I think you're going to get the desired results here

Best of luck with your project.

[absynthe]

Cool...hopefully some of my buddies will still see it Still listed, but just as "moved".

Thanks for the wish of good luck!


Any more ideas for some good questions to get this thing headed in the right direction?

This post has been edited by absynthe: 04 February 2009 - 09:27 PM

[absynthe]

24 hours and nothing...wow! Knew this would happen the minute this got moved.

[markhazlett9]

Well that's a really large project... what's the time frame? Are you still on the project planning stages? What development platform are you using... I'm guessing you're using java?

Now, back to questions to ask... What about asking about the skills of the users? If you have a user that really doesn't like computers then it will need to be something that even they can use and use well...

I would ask about how many users will be using the system... And also how many computers your system will be installed on. This will let you know if you need login code, network security, that kinda thing.

Also, a UI prototype is a great idea to have. Once you find out a few more specifics like what they want the system to do exactly, what they want it to hold, how they want to access the information, you can mock up a UI prototype to help get the visual process going from there. Hope this helps...

[absynthe]

markhazlett9, on 6 Feb, 2009 - 12:05 PM, said:

Well that's a really large project... what's the time frame? Are you still on the project planning stages? What development platform are you using... I'm guessing you're using java?

Now, back to questions to ask... What about asking about the skills of the users? If you have a user that really doesn't like computers then it will need to be something that even they can use and use well...

I would ask about how many users will be using the system... And also how many computers your system will be installed on. This will let you know if you need login code, network security, that kinda thing.

Also, a UI prototype is a great idea to have. Once you find out a few more specifics like what they want the system to do exactly, what they want it to hold, how they want to access the information, you can mock up a UI prototype to help get the visual process going from there. Hope this helps...

Thank you so much! You're right! Large Project with about 2 months to do the work. We are doing it in JAVA.
The skillset of the User is an awesome suggestion, that's something I always forget I assume people are skilled! Thanks for that and the rest! Wonderful Suggestions!

Are there any other good first meeting questions you can think of? Or anyone else?

[markhazlett9]

First meeting questions... hmmm... I guess I would just be asking about skillset of the user, what the user thinks the system should be able to do. For a first interview I wouldn't get into things like data type, that kinda thing. The main point of the first interview is to figure out enough information so you can make a GUI prototype... Anything after that is going to be for second/third... So what I suggest... before the interview draw up what you think the GUI should look like.. This will allow you to determine alot of questions. Like while you are designing the GUI, you will notice yourself figure out questions that you can complete the GUI. This is the best way to figure out questions you need to ask. Hope this helps... Cheers

[absynthe]

Thank you so much! That is a really really good answer! You're absolutely right too!! I really appreciate the time you took for me. Gobs of people read it but not many took the time to answer!! And I know that this question could be answered pretty much by anyone (with their own advice) but not many did so you really are wonderful! Thanks Again!

[absynthe]

Any other ideas?

Also, do you see any way to do this in one GUI? Is that possible?

This post has been edited by absynthe: 12 February 2009 - 09:45 AM

[markhazlett9]

I think for sure it's do-able in one GUI... I think that's the way you want to plan it out... The use of tabs and combo boxes etc are key. Also, take a look at JLayeredPane... This will allow you to put multiple panels on top of each other and only make certain ones visible when certain actions are performed such as a radio button is clicked or something along those lines.

So from what it looks like you will need some sort of search function for the database.. How I would set this up is have a single search bar at the top left, and then have a actionchanged event that listens for it...

Then you will need some way of displaying search results... I would probably put an area where the user would be able to click on a result that they want, so maybe a JScrollPane or something like that...

Next you will need some way of displaying information about the search result... So I would recommend probably something like a series of labels and text boxes to display the info... Remember... This can all be done using the JLayeredPane and only have things appear when certain actions are clicked... This meaning when a user performs a search then the search results come visible... then when the user clicks on a search result the information about that search result become visible... And you can even add in some cool animations to make it flow....


Hope this helps! Good luck!

[absynthe]

This is all the info I have to form the questions from for the initial contact with their expert:

Quote

CapSim
We have a single-step production process through which all our products must run. Subcomponents arrive to be processed with some variation in interarrival time. The time it takes them in processing also varies. For each order, a customer provides a best finish time plus a penalty for finishing late and a penalty for finishing early. Given Java.class files to generate order arrivals with their associated properties, we need you to deliver a simulation tool that can calculate our long-term average cost over a large number of simulations under different scheduling policies., e.g. First-Come-First-Served vs. Earliest Due Date First. We have an operations research consultant that will recommend policies. Your deliverable needs to be able to run and store in a database the detailed results of a large number of repetitions for each combination of conditions and associated cost parameters and policy info. You will also need to report statistics of interest for the simulations. e.g. fraction of late deliveries. We need a simple GUI that will allow our capacity planners to change the number of machines in your and their properties (speed) to investigate factory improvement proposals that are desperately needed.

[markhazlett9]

Well since they need the gui to track inventory(from what i can see) Then You might want to be asking them specific questions about that inventory... Such as say: how much inventory are you storing... Is there going to be a cap on how much inventory you want to keep in the system? Also you might want to ask them what type of inventory they are storing and how they would like to see it organized. You might also want to ask questions about their current system, so how they are currently keeping track of the inventory and what problems they are having with it. Once you figure out the problems with the current inventory system then you can make sure that your system does not include any of those same mistakes that are causing them issues. This will lead you to a great system that the company is happy with. You might also want the users opinion on how they think it should look... What features it should include, and that type of thing. Cheers

[absynthe]

This is what I have come up with so far! Do you see anything Im missing or should be removed?

Quote

CapSim
We have a single-step production process through which all our products must run. Subcomponents arrive to be processed with some variation in inter arrival time. The time it takes them in processing also varies.
For each order, a customer provides a best finish time plus a penalty for finishing late and a penalty for finishing early. Given Java.class files to generate order arrivals with their associated properties, we need you to deliver a simulation tool that can calculate our long-term average cost over a large number of simulations under different scheduling policies., e.g. First-Come-First-Served vs. Earliest Due Date First.
We have an operations research consultant that will recommend policies. Your deliverable needs to be able to run and store in a database the detailed results of a large number of repetitions for each combination of conditions and associated cost parameters and policy info. You will also need to report statistics of interest for the simulations. e.g. fraction of late deliveries.
We need a simple GUI that will allow our capacity planners to change the number of machines in your and their properties (speed) to investigate factory improvement proposals that are desperately needed.

General
1. What is your goal after system implementation?
a. What are the strategic objectives that will be supported by our system?
b. What are the transactions the system will process?
2. What’s the skill set of the users?
a. Will management need different information than standard users?
3. What does the user want the system do?
4. Will the new system interface with legacy systems?
a. What system do you have in place?
5. What version of Oracle do you want used?
a. (If Oracle Enterprise 11g is used option for OLAP )
6. What security issues exist?
7. How many computers will the system be installed on?
a. Do you need a logon code?
b. Do you need network security?
c. What types of systems are being used?
d. What extent are these systems integrated with each other?
e. Are there systems used outside of the organization?
8. What role do you envision you [or your company] partaking of during this process?
9. How periodically do you want updates?



Policies
1. What kind of scheduling policies do you have?
a. How many?
2. Do certain policies have precedence?
3. Do you want the policy info in the database to allow for additional policies in the future?

Product
1. What type of product are you delivering?
2. Does the product vary in size? (Delivery time change with size?)
3. Does your delivery method vary per product?

Inventory
What type of information about the inventory will you be storing?
a. (Ask questions about inventory to determine fields for GUI and tables)
b. (How they want the inventory displayed?)
1. Is there going to be a cap on how much inventory you want to keep in the system?
2. Do you need a search function for the database?
Reports
1. What type of reports do you need generated?

Any ideas would be wonderful!!