The material for assignment 5 was interesting for me to cover. I am a top-down systems thinker and much less of a fine granular thinker, so this part of the course was a little more interesting than the more detail-oriented diagramming of some of the earlier assignments. The material covered in this section is, to me, a little less granular and somewhat more conceptual, though each topic covered has fine details that need to be addressed. This assignment went much more quickly for due to far less focus on using the diagramming software.

I found that this assignment offered more opportunity for iterative improvement than the previous assignments, though that is likely partially attributed to the later stages of the development process. I found that on this assignment I identified a few things that I missed on earlier assignments, which happened even before receiving feedback from assignment 4. The drawback is that you can’t go back to previous assignments to change them for better mark, unfortunately. This process effectively highlighted the highly iterative nature of the process, though, especially for someone newer to the process. I have considerable experience in process design and improvement from my previous career in manufacturing management, so I am conceptually familiar with much of the process mechanics and the iterative nature. The thing that stood out most for me was the environmental knowledge and experience factor. The overall concept of systems design and analysis is similar in most environments; the environment specific knowledge is the biggest differentiating factor. The more knowledge and experience you have in a specific environment (industry, or section of an industry), the fewer iterations will be necessary functionally. Also, I think it is relatively obvious that the more you do the SDLC, the more efficient your process becomes.

Specific to the Assignment 5 material, I didn’t struggle with much of anything conceptually. The hard part for me is identifying the details that need to be addressed, again due to my inexperience in software systems design. I’m still at the stage where it would take quite a few iterations through the relational database schema to get it solid. But again, with repetition comes proficiency.