Needs Assessment, Systems Development: LBG

Systems Development: Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing

Needs Assessment

The US nationwide divorce rate is fifty percent, meaning that for every two marriage licenses issued, one final decree of divorce is issued. In Dallas County, Texas, the rate is even worse: 70%!

Why is the rate so high? Many psychologists say this is due to two things: instant gratification and unrealistic expectations. Engineers say that's the same thing, since the desire for the former comes about if the latter persists.

Question: what do Dallas County couples and Information Technology systems have in common?
Answer: the failure rate is the same!

This is why the needs assessment process of the systems development life cycle is so important: the definition of success is captured during this phase. If the system does not meet both spoken and unspoken needs, it will be deemed a failure.

Process Activities

In our introduction, we discovered a process includes activities, among other things. The primary activity of needs assessment is information gathering. This is accomplished with two sub-activities:

Interviews
Surveys

This is the human part of needs assessment. The engineering part is using these needs as an input to requirements specification process.

Exercise

Our goal in this part of the course is to perform an actual needs assessment for a development project. This will be a practical application of the theory contained in our readings. Bear this in mind: we need to understand concepts formally, such as engineering interviews. But we also must apply these concepts to a real-world project.

Study Guides

Use the following study guides to focus concepts from the readings:

Lecture Slides

Here are copies of the lecture slides presented during class:

English

Readings

As before, each of the listed links will open in a new browser window:

Concept	Notes	Links
Information Gathering	We mentioned interviews and surveys as two sub-activities to needs assessment. Here are overviews of information gathering.	Data Gathering Methods: Overview by Prime II, a USAID project. Data Gathering: Rob Kremer, University of Calgary
Interviewing	For systems analysis, there is a formal method for conducting interviews	The Interview And Other Data Gathering Methods: Chapter 7 of Martin Modell's on-line book, "A Professional's Guide to Systems Analysis" Interviewing and Data Gathering Techniques: University of Missouri - St. Louis.
Survey Instruments	Surveys can be part of an interview or conducted separately.	A Tutorial on Survey Instruments: Association for Information Systems. Developing Effective Surveys: New Jersey University of Health Sciences. More specific to the medical profession, but applicable to systems development nonetheless.
Sample Survey	Here is a survey implemented as a web form as an example.	Sample Survey Instrument: Sun Associates.

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