Business System Analysis Cheat Sheet free essay sample

A system is a set of steps (process) put together to accomplish a task. An information system (IS) is an arrangement of people, data, processes, and information technology that interact to collect, process, store, and provide as output the information needed to support an organization. Types of IS : A transaction processing system (TPS): captures and processes data about business transactions. A management information system (MIS): provides for management-oriented reporting based on other computer systems. A decision support system (DSS): provides information to help make decisions. An expert system: captures the expertise of workers and then simulates that expertise to the benefit of nonexperts. A communications and collaboration system: enables more effective communications between workers, partners, customers, and suppliers to enhance their ability to collaborate. An office automation system: supports the wide range of business office activities that provide for improved work flow between workers. Systems analyst – a specialist who studies the problems and needs of an organization to determine how people, data, processes, and information technology can best accomplish improvements for the business. Chap2 : Information systems architecture a unifying framework into which various stakeholders with different perspectives can organize and view the fundamental building blocks of information systems. Knowledge (ERD), process (UML) and communication (Interface). Chap3 : Capability Maturity Model (CMM) – a standardized framework for assessing the maturity level of an organization’s information system development and management processes and products. Model-driven development – a system development strategy that emphasizes the drawing of system models to help visualize and analyze problems, define business requirements, and design information systems. Process modeling – a process-centered technique popularized by the structured analysis and design methodology that used models of business process requirements to derive effective software designs for a system. Data modeling – a data-centered technique used to model business data requirements and design database systems that fulfill those requirements. Object modeling – a technique that attempts to merge the data and process concerns into singular constructs called objects. Object models are diagrams that document a system in terms of its objects and their interactions. Chap4 : Project management – the process of scoping, planning, staffing, organizing, directing, and controlling the development of an acceptable system at a minimum cost within a specified time frame. Process management – the activity of documenting, managing, and continually improving the process of systems development. Joint project planning (JPP) – a strategy in which all stakeholders attend an intensive workshop aimed at reaching consensus on project decisions. Chap5: Discovery Prototyping: a technique used to identify the users’ business requirements by having them react to a quick-and-dirty implementation of those requirements. Rapid Architected Analysis: an approach that attempts to derive system models from existing systems or discovery prototypes. Requirements discovery – the process, used by systems analysts of identifying or extracting system problems and solution requirements from the user community. Approaches include: Fact-finding – the process of collecting information about system problems, opportunities, solution requirements, and priorities via sampling, research, observation, questionnaires and surveys, and interviews. Joint requirements planning (JRP) – the use of facilitated workshops to bring together all of the system owners, users, and analysts, and some systems designer and builders to jointly perform systems analysis. JRP is generally considered a part of a larger method called joint application development (JAD), a more comprehensive application of the JRP techniques to the entire systems development process. Business process redesign (BPR) – the application of systems analysis methods to the goal of dramatically changing and improving the fundamental business processes of an organization, independent of information technology. Agile method – the integration of various approaches of systems analysis and design for applications as deemed appropriate to the problem being solved and the system being developed. Chap6: Use-case modeling – the process of modeling a system’s functions in terms of business events, who initiated the events, and how the system responds to those events. Use-case modeling has roots in object-oriented modeling. Use case – a behaviorally related sequence of steps (a scenario), both automated and manual, for the purpose of completing a single business task. Description of system functions from the perspective of external users in terminology they understand. Use-case diagram – a diagram that depicts the interactions between the system and external systems and users. It graphically describes who will use the system and in what ways the user expects to interact with the system. Use-case narrative – a textual description of the business even and how the user will interact with the system to accomplish the task. Extension use case – a use case consisting of steps extracted from a more complex use case in order to simplify the original case and thus extend its functionality. Abstract use case – a use case that reduces redundancy among two or more other use cases by combining the common steps found in those cases. Depends On – a use case relationship that specifies which other use cases must be performed before the current use case. Inheritance – a use case relationship in which the common behavior of two actors initiating the same use case is extrapolated and assigned to a new abstract actor to reduce redundancy. Chap8: Data modeling – a technique for organizing and documenting a system’s data. Sometimes called database modeling. Entity relationship diagram (ERD) – a data model utilizing several notations to depict data in terms of the entities and relationships described by that data. Entity – a class of persons, places, objects, events, or concepts about which we need to capture and store data. Attribute or elements – a descriptive property or characteristic of an entity. Compound attribute – an attribute that consists of other attributes. Synonyms in different data modeling languages are numerous: concatenated attribute, composite attribute, and data structure. Key – an attribute, or a group of attributes, that assumes a unique value for each entity instance. It is sometimes called an identifier. Concatenated key a group of attributes that uniquely identifies an instance of an entity. Synonyms include composite key and compound key. Candidate key – one of a number of keys that may serve as the primary key of an entity. Also called a candidate identifier. Primary key – a candidate key that will most commonly be used to uniquely identify a single entity instance. Alternate key – a candidate key that is not selected to become the primary key is called an alternate key. A synonym is secondary key. Cardinality – the minimum and maximum number of occurrences of one entity that may be related to a single occurrence of the other entity. Associative entity – an entity that inherits its primary key from more than one other entity (called parents). Foreign key – a primary key of an entity that is used in another entity to identify instances of a relationship. Nonspecific relationship – a relationship where many instances of an entity are associated with many instances of another entity. Also called many-to-many relationship. Normalization – a data analysis technique that organizes data into groups to form nonredundant, stable, flexible, and adaptive entities. First normal form (1NF) – an entity whose attributes have no more than one value for a single instance of that entity. Second normal form (2NF) – an entity whose nonprimary-key attributes are dependent on the full primary key. Third normal form (3NF) – an entity whose nonprimary-key attributes are not dependent on any other non-primary key attributes. System Analysis: Study of an organization’s policies and procedures and processes. It involves breaking down these processes, studying the processes and interactions. The processes are documented using narratives and diagrams.