Determine which of the four common approaches (traditional, prototype, RAD and e

Question

Determine which of the four common approaches (traditional, prototype, RAD and enduser development), would be most suitable for the following real life scenarios, justifying your answer.

o Scenario 1 - Jane, the Accounting Manager for Nationwide Audio Inc, leads a team of highly skilled professionals who have been managing all of the accounting activities manually on spreadsheets and word documents. A companywide initiative to reduce spending is the latest project of the new VP of Finance, resulting in new detailed reporting requirements. The project team will consist of skilled users from all area of the organization and must be ready for implementation in 6 months.

o Scenario 2 - Steve is the owner of a rapidly growing department store. The store is using an out of date AIS, resulting in poor customer service, late and errorprone billing and inefficient control and the monitoring of inventory. If the store is to continue growing its AIS must be upgraded, however Steve is unsure of what exactly he needs the AIS to do to improve all the above issues.

o Scenario 3 - Samantha is the Manager of Capital for The Town of Somewhere located in Northern Ontario. She has been tracking fixed assets purchased by the town on spreadsheets. This has caused multiple problems as not all data has been updated in a consistent manner, only one user can access the spreadsheet at a time etc. Samantha is fully aware of all the requirements and has a great working knowledge of database systems. Samantha has access to the complete Microsoft Office Suite, including Microsoft Access.

o Scenario 4 - Joseph works for CanBlue, a large organization that is highly specialized in their field, and as a result they are unable to find any off the shelf packaged solutions to meet their diverse needs. Consultations have occurred and it has been recommended that CanBlue develop an inhouse solution. Many of the stakeholders are worried about taking on such a large activity.

Explanation / Answer

Scenario 1- Understand the requirements and follow step by step of product development

Scenario 2- Product up gradation with new features

Scenario 3- Problem with scaling up – Prototype style is suits this scenario.

Scenario 4- Customization of the software

Traditional approach: This is normal new product development approach followed in any conventional setup. It is like functional approach, like the first designer completes their part, goes for prototyping and coding and integration, testing and validation etc. This is many disadvantages to this approach, the cost is more and time taken to develop is more because it worked in sequence and lot of duplication etc. Scenario 1 can adopt a traditional approach to developing software because it needs to understand the requirement first.

Prototype: In this approach, the prototype is developed first as part of software development and taken the feedback from the stakeholder. After making necessary changes in prototyping, real product deployment starts. This approach is a quick fix for the problems related to scale up and effort duplication. It costs less because it uses current platforms and it requires less effort and no need to start from zero level. But the chance of failure is less because of prototyping and this approach can be adopted in scenarios 3.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) model: It adopts modular concepts and a type of incremental model. In this, modules or the components or functions are developed in parallel as if they were mini projects. The developments are time boxed, delivered and then assembled into a working prototype.  This can quickly give the customer something to see and use and to provide feedback regarding the delivery and their requirements. The phases of the rapid application development (RAD) model are Business modelling, Data modelling, Process modelling, Application generation and Testing and turnover. Through this, we can reduce the development time, increase reusability of modules or components, quick internal reviews and customer feedback on the prototype and integrates very well into the overall system from the beginning. Scenario 2 can adopt this approach to develop the software.

End-User Development: Customization of the product. This approach takes a lot of time and needs to customize the solution to customer needs. Effort and time took in this case more compared to the models. The failure rate is very less and 100% customized to your needs. The efficiency of the development team is very low because everything is customized to specific requirements. At the end, it meets customer requirements and leads to higher customer satisfaction. Scenario 4 can adopt this approach.

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