BCS Systems Development Essentials using Agile

You’ll study a number of systems development life cycles, both defined and evolutionary, and examine the context in which different lifecycles could be applied before focusing on an Agile approach.

Some of the key areas we’ll look at include examining how the systems development effort can be organised, understanding requirements, stakeholders and roles in an agile environment and considering techniques that support iterative development such as prototyping, hothousing and scenarios.

Anyone developing systems in Agile

This course examines the purpose and structure of, and the techniques used in, developing information systems. It covers the traditional, ‘waterfall’, approach to systems development but emphasises more the ‘Agile’ approach that is increasingly widely adopted in many organisations.

• Introduction
• Characteristics of software quality
• The purposes, objectives and tasks of systems development
• Roles and responsibilities in systems development
• Technical and interpersonal skills of the business analysts and solution developers
• Systems architecture
• Enterprise, systems and infrastructure levels of architecture
• Inputs at an enterprise level
• Inputs at system and infrastructure level
• Model Driven Architecture
• Bespoke development
• Commercial off the shelf (COTS) software package solutions
• Configuring and customising COTS software package solutions
• Component-based systems development
• Service-based solutions and other approaches
• Evolutionary prototyping
• Systems development lifecycles
• Waterfall model
• V model
• Incremental model
• Spiral (evolutionary) model
• Advantages and disadvantages of each approach
• Selection of an appropriate development approach
• Methods and approaches
• Detailed study of the Agile approach including life cycle, deliverables and roles
• Iterative systems development using the DSDM Atern methodology
• Other agile development methodologies (The Unified Process (UP), Scrum, eXtreme Programming)
• Modelling techniques
• Models of the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
• Interpretation and principles of Use case diagram, Use case description, Class diagram, State machine diagram
• Validating models using a CRUD matrix
• Requirements in an Agile environment
• Fact finding approaches for Workshops, Interviewing, Questionnaires
• Scenario analysis, storyboarding, user stories, hot-housing and Model office and focus groups
• Functional requirements definition
• Non-functional requirements definition
• Documenting & prioritising requirements
• Human aspects of systems investigation and introducing change
• Iterative systems development
• Features of iterative development approach
• Prototyping
• Categories of prototype
• Timeboxing
• Prototype development plans
• Systems design, implementation and maintenance
• Design principles and constraints (legal, ethical, financial)
• Systems deployment and hand over
• Post-implementation reviews
• Different types of
• maintenance
• Estimation and development planning
• Quality assurance
• Definitions of software quality
• The V model
• Requirements-driven testing
• Static testing: types of walkthrough and inspection
• Post-project reviews
• CASE and CAST tools
• Features of Computer-aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Computer-aided Software Testing tools (CAST)
• Life-cycle coverage
• Requirements traceability
• Advantages and disadvantages of software development support tool