REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION & DATABASE DESIGN

Requirements Elicitation & Database Design and Normalization Databases

Abstract

Owing to rapidly changing customer needs and much shorter product life cycles, for developing a successful product it is imperative to employ more efficient and flexible approaches for product conceptualization. To meet this demand, a Web-enabled product definition and customization system (PDCS) is proposed, from a design-knowledge-handling viewpoint, in this paper. It comprises two phases, namely product definition based on the laddering technique and a novel design knowledge hierarchy, and product customization based on an integrated methodology of conjoint analysis and Kohonen association techniques. Basically, this system is a method of conducting design decision-making via customer involvement, i.e. a strategy for transforming customer preference into a specific product concept. A case study on wood golf club design is used to illustrate and validate the proposed Web-enabled PDCS. Confusion exists among database textbooks as to the goal of normalization as well as to which normal form a designer should aspire. The advent of larger and more complex software systems has resulted in the need to reconsider the ways in which information pertaining to those systems is stored, visualized, organized, and retrieved. We present a normalization framework for the design of multimedia database schemas with reduced manipulation anomalies. To this end, we introduce new extended dependencies. Such dependencies are based on distance functions that are used for detecting semantic relationships between complex data types. Based upon these new dependencies, we have defined five multimedia normal forms. Finally, we have performed a simulation on a large image data set to analyze the impact of the proposed framework in the context of content-based retrieval applications and in e-learning applications.

Table of Contents

Abstractii

Chapter 1: Introduction5

Background5

Requirements Engineering Process7

System Requirements Development8

Requirements Gathering/Elicitation From Various Sources9

Requirements Analysis And Documentation9

System Requirements Validation And Verification10

Normalization criteria11

Chapter 2: Literature Review19

The Product Definition Phase21

Review Of Requirements Elicitation Methods23

Categories Of Elicitation Methods26

Traditional Techniques26

Cognitive Techniques31

Model-driven Techniques33

Confronting Requirements Of Wide Audience End-Users34

Contextual Technique - Contextual Inquiry36

Cognitive Technique - Critical Success Chains40

Chapter 3: Extended Dependencies for normalization43

Type-M Functional Dependencies (MFDs)44

Inference Rules46

The reflexive rule47

The Augmentation Rule47

The Decomposition Rule48

The pseudotransitive rule48

Multivalued and Join Type-M Dependencies52

Comparing MFD with Other Extended Dependencies59

Normal Forms in System Databases65

Chapter 4: Requirements Elicitation67

Chapter 5: Normalization Framework Evaluation73

Evaluating The Framework In An Image Retrieval Context75

Discussion80

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Future Work86

References90

Appendices98

Chapter 1: Introduction

Information systems have become a necessary investment in most agencies' overall business strategy, performing basic operations, supporting executive decisions, satisfying management reporting requirements and the need for public access to information. Improvements are needed in the quality, effectiveness and productivity of information system development methods to offset an increasing demand and a growing information system inventory. Developing and supporting an information system is complex and requires extensive planning similar to plans used routinely in engineering projects (Wu; et.al 2005 41).

Background

The concept of socio-technical systems was established to stress the reciprocal interrelationship between humans and machines and to foster the program of shaping both theoretical and the social conditions of work. A socio-technical system can be regarded as a theoretical construct for describing and explaining technology generally (Boutilier Bacchus and Brafman 2001 56-64). This chapter helps to describe a multidisciplinary role of requirements ...