TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS FOR SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

There are four main ways of investigating how information works at present.

• INTERVIEWS; it is important to interview key members of staff such as managers and users. The analyst should take notes and show them to the interviewee to make sure that they have got the details right.
• QUESTIONNAIRES; questionnaires are likely to be used when there are a very large number of users.
• OBSERVATION; simply involves watching users do their jobs, writing down what they need to do and looking for problems such as bottlenecks in the system.
• DOCUMENT ANALYSIS; means looking at existing documents such as business forms, reports, records, orders, invoices, diaries. Document analysis should answer who, what, where, and how.

Rules for decision flow diagrams:

• There should be a data store for every entity.
• Information flows show data and not physical terms.
• Entities don't link directly to data stores.
• What goes in must come out.

Techniques for testing.
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