Assignment 4 was an interesting look at the beginnings of the design phase of SDLC. I’m not much of an abstract thinker – I like to develop and use visual layouts to aid me along the way, which is precisely the material covered in the first part of Unit 5. I’m finding that the various diagrams are a huge help in visualizing the system layout and interactivity.

The bigger challenge for me was fissuring out Visual Paradigm on the fly. In the past, I’ve had no problem coming into a situation with unfamiliar software and had little trouble figuring everything out, but that was in my past career in manufacturing management – I had a solid knowledge base of the subject materials and underlying concepts, so it was just a matter of figuring out how the software handled the various functions of the working environment. Now, in a situation that requires learning of the software in addition to the subject material, I found the progress much slower and more difficult by comparison. I definitely recommend taking a few hours just to learn the basics of the software if you are unfamiliar with it. It’s like learning woodworking when you’ve never used the tools before.

That said, Visual Paradigm has a YouTube channel that has a few good tutorials, if nothing specific enough for my needs as a total newbie to the software and the concepts of SDLC. I was able to learn enough on the fly between YouTube and my past experience with learning software to get by within the time frame I had to complete the assignment, but it will take considerably more time with the SDLC material and the software to get comfortable with it.

My work on the diagrams may not be 100%, but as I become more familiar with it, I’ll get better at it. Same goes for system design.