I enjoyed doing assignment 2 and learning the content it covers. Now we are getting into the meat and potatoes, so to speak, and acquiring the actual tools that we can use in systems analysis and design. I spent many years in manufacturing management and was involved in many systems improvement exercises over 15 years, so the concept of system design is familiar to me; the only thing left as to apply them in this new context of information systems design. I was familiar with process layout, flow charts, and inter-process relationships, so conceptually this seemed somewhat natural to me.

One of the biggest challenges for me in this assignment was learning the UML diagramming tool, sort of on the fly. Every software tool has unique intricacies (even if most tools within the same use space are similar); so just as with programming language, where my biggest delays are typos and syntax errors like forgetting a bracket or a curly brace, using a new software tool was my biggest delay. Once I got over that hurdle (at least in the case of building use case and domain class model diagrams – there is much I have yet to learn about Visual Paradigm), things flowed a little more smoothly.

The other biggest challenge was constructing complete and comprehensive environments to make complete use case and domain class model diagrams. I tend to think iteratively, so covering all the bases in a shorter amount of time doesn’t come easily for me. I could spend hours re-iterating over all the use cases and documenting all the related classes and functionality, but the challenge is to cover the criteria stated in the assignment without exploring subsystems that aren’t required for this assignment.

I particularly enjoyed constructing the Domain Class Model diagram, even just balancing the aesthetic and functional layout of the diagram itself – trying to keep the lines clean by positioning the classes so that the relationship lines don’t become tangled, so that the model as easy to read and understand. The Domain Class Model is particularly effective for me – it allows me to see relationships between attributes in different classes, not just relationships between the classes themselves.