mis software overview for mis concept plan. mis software... · mis software overview . for mis...

MIS Software overview for MIS Concept Plan

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT OF CAAN November 2012

MIS Software overview

Ingeniería y Economía del Transporte, S.A.

1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 3

2 LIFE CYCLE OF SOFTWARE ........................................................................ 4

2.1 Analyse user requirements ................................................................................ 4

2.2 Design the program ........................................................................................... 5

2.3 Code the program ............................................................................................. 5

2.4 Documentation and test the system .................................................................. 5

2.5 Operate and maintain the system ...................................................................... 6

3 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS ......................................................... 7

3.1 Traditional ......................................................................................................... 7

3.2 Agile .................................................................................................................. 9

4 SOFTWARE LICENSES .............................................................................. 12

4.1 Non-Open Source licences .............................................................................. 13

5 OPEN SOURCE LICENSES ......................................................................... 13

6 KINDS OF SOFTWARE ............................................................................. 14

6.1 Business Intelligence (BI) ................................................................................ 14

6.2 Collaborative software ..................................................................................... 15

6.3 Content management system (CMS) .............................................................. 15

6.4 Customer relationship management (CRM) .................................................... 16

6.5 Document management system ...................................................................... 16

6.6 Enterprise resource planning (ERP) ................................................................ 16

6.7 Issue tracking system ...................................................................................... 17

6.8 Office automation ............................................................................................ 18

6.9 Business Project Management (BPM) ............................................................. 18



1 Introduction The main purpose of this document is to do an overview of the computer software and their characteristics. Several issues about life cycle of software, frequent troubles of software development process, software benefits and productivity enhancement will be covered, in order to show the different alternatives that CAAN has to take into account to build MIS architecture and the decisions to be taken. IEEE Std. defines software like "the collection of computer programs, procedures, rules, and associated documentation and data", concerned with the operation of a data processing system. Software is also defined as a set of three components: programs, data and documentation. • Programs: this component provides the required functionality and the performance

when the program is run. • Data: this component involves the necessary data to manage and test the

programs and the required structures to maintain and manipulate those data. • Documents: this component describes the operation and use of the program.

Basically, software is a set of programs, which provide the required functionality, the related data and documents. Therefore, software is a logic element, completely different to hardware. Software is developed; it is not produced, in the classic way. Each software is different from each other, because each one is developed under the unique customer requirements. Therefore, each software needs to be built using an engineering approach. Building a software product involves understanding what is necessary, designing the product that fits the requirement, implementing the design using a programming language and verifying that the product fits the requirements. All these activities are handled by a team working in a coordinate manner. The main resource to make a software product is the persons. The working team has to work in a coordinated way and have to share a common project. A good communication in the team is needed. It is important to mention, that the software is not damaged but is deteriorated. During the product’s life, it can be changed because of the maintenance. With these changes it is possible that new defects could be created. Because of those changes, the software is deteriorated. The next section will show the life cycle of software and the process to develop a software product.



2 Life cycle of software The life cycle of software describes the process of software development, from start until end. This process is based on a methodology that the analyst, designer and developer follow to develop the system. The information systems are very expensive to modify, so, an error detected at the end of the development could be very expensive to repair. To prevent this fact, it is necessary to follow the cycle of software. The aim of the life cycle of software is to produce a high quality and complex system, to the optimum in sequence of phases. Each phase produces deliverables that are needed by the next phase. The essential phases of a development life cycle are the follows: analysis, design, implementation, testing and maintenance, as illustrated.

Phases of Development Life Cycle

2.1 Analyse user requirements The main goal of the first phase of the life cycle of software is to obtain the requirements of the system. For this purpose it is necessary to do meetings with managers and user to achieve a list of functionality that the system should perform. As a result of this phase, the requirement specifications document and the entity-relationship diagram are created. This is one of the most important phases for the success of the system, because every functionality or user requirements must be defined in this phase. Therefore, an error made in this step can be very expensive to repair at the end of the process.



2.2 Design the program When the list of requirements is completed, it is time to start with the design phase. In this step, it will be determined how the software will works in an overall way. The main tasks of this step it to cover the software architecture definition, user experience design, technology environment, and information system’s components specification. Basically, topics related to the technology implementation are considered such as, hardware, network....

2.3 Code the program In this phase the code of the components of the information system will be generated, in order to cover every requirement defined previously. The complexity and duration of this phase depends on the programming language, platform selected, and the design created in the previous phase. All operation procedures and security are developed in this phase. The user manual and operation manual are also created in order to ensure the correct operation of the system in the future. Besides, in this phase the developer team must be formed and trained in order to develop applications specializing in them. It is very important to keep a well-balanced team for a long time to achieve the improve of quality of code and the productivity.

2.4 Documentation and test the system Documentation is one of the most important things around of software development; every phase of life cycle must be documented and also approved by the responsible person in each case. Project's documentation is alive, in other words: every functionality, each decision made in the project (technic or non-technic) must be written inside of a document and is mandatory that each document is stored in accessible way for every project participant. This phase consists on checking that all tasks defined in the first phase and user requirements are created correctly in the system. In order to make the objective described, it is possible to make unit tests, integration subsystem test, components tests, and system tests according to the test plan. A good practice on this point would be that these tests will be done by someone different to the person who did the development.



2.5 Operate and maintain the system This is the last stage of the life cycle of software. The maintenance starts after the system is operating and delivering. The goal of this phase is to maintain and improve the software to solve any mistakes that could be found, and handle new requirements. Most of the times, this is the longest phase. The development of this phase, depends on the design and good documentation, made in the previous phases. Changes made in software with poor documentation and bad design could be more expensive than developing the software from the beginning. Because of this, it is really important to do correctly all tasks involved in the design phase and maintain and create completely the documentation. There are four main types of changes that could be made:

• Corrective: resolve the problems discovered in the software. • Adaptive: keep the software product usable in a changed or changing

environment. • Perfective: change the software to improve performance and maintainability. • Evolve: change the software to meet the new requirements.



3 Software development process There are different models of how to lead software projects; each one follows an approach to do several tasks or activities that are followed during the process. Anyone of these processes can be suitable to the development process and each one of them is under the principles or rules of their methodology. Methodology A methodology is a framework that is used in software engineer to determinate the structure, plan and control the process of developing software to improve the quality of final product, and it also helps project managers and software developers in delivering project on time, within the budget to meet the customer requirements. The methodology framework includes policies, procedures, methods, tools, technologies and documentation which help each activity of the software life cycle. This framework is also a philosophy of software development with an approach of its process. Every approach acts as base of a specific framework to develop and maintain software. Several software development approaches have been used. Some examples are waterfall, prototyping, incremental, spiral, RAD and extreme programming. The benefits of a methodology in the process of software development are:

• Optimizing software process and products. • Guiding the planning and developing of software by methods. • Defining what to do, how and when during the developing and maintenance of a

project. • A methodology says how a project has to be developed, based on software

process.

Different types of methodologies exist depending on their philosophies; each one is suitable for a particular kind of project.

3.1 Traditional This methodology is based on sequential steps to be followed in the development process. These steps are requirements definition, implementation, testing and deploy. An initial documentation of stable requirements is required, and is not allowed to reach next steps until the previous ones have been completed, in a sequential manner. The aim of this discipline is to make the software more predictable and more efficient. It is said that this type of methodology is very inflexible and is not change-oriented, besides it can take longer time for the software development. The features of this discipline are as follows:



• Predictive approach

•

: It is focused on the planning of the software process in great details. It is based on the theory that the development is repeatable and predictive, focusing on the system needs and how to resolve these needs efficiently. The plan predicts the task, schedule and budget for construction.

Completed Documentation

•

: The main topic is the design. During this step all customers’ requirements are detected and collected. It needs to have the requirements before starting the implementation. Predictability is very important to be able to achieve all requirements. All of these requirements have to be documented.

Process Oriented

•

: Processes are defined involving certain tasks that must be performed by the managers, designers, programmers, testers…

Tool Oriented

: Project management tools, code editors, compilers, etc. must be in use for completion and delivery of each task.

This kind of methodology is based on fixed steps. In fact, the most important principle is that the requirements listed in the first step will never change along the project. There are some methodologies that follow this approach such as Waterfall, Prototyping, Incremental, Spiral Model and Unified Process.

• Waterfall

: is a linear framework in which there is not iteration between the stages. This approach models the development process as a stately and sequential progression through the life cycle phases, requirements specifications, design, implementation, testing/verification and maintenance. The model is orderly, simply and easy to understand and manage, but the problem is that sometimes it does not fit with all types of projects because the software development is a complex process.

• Prototyping: an iterative framework, in which unfinished pieces of the product are shown to the customer, so the customer can see how the project is going and he can be involved more in the process ensuring requirements. The customer sees the progression of the project through the different prototypes.



• Incremental

•

: a combined linear-iterative framework, in which there are deliveries in incremental series. The first delivery incorporates a part of the total planned capabilities; the next build adds more capabilities, and so on, until the entire system is completed

Spiral

During any iteration, the system is explored at greater depth and more detail is added. At the early prototypes, early in the development process it is possible to locate the risk areas, assess prototyping results and determine the risk areas. The iterative nature allows using the knowledge gained during early phases to improve the subsequent phases.

: a combined linear-iterative framework, in which the focus is on risks analysis, a topic which was forgotten by the previous approaches. This methodology divides the phases into a number of cyclically repeated sectors.

3.2 Agile This methodology appears by the need of business community to have rapid software development process. Thanks to the light process, the customer could see frequent pieces of functionality. Agile methodologies are known for being cheaper, faster, and quicker to respond to changing market demands, as compared to the slower but steady, sequential process of the traditional methods. Software team takes importance on the success of development process, where team composition is cross-functional and self-organizing without considering any corporate hierarchy. Team members take responsibility for each iteration requirements. One of the most important principles of these kinds of methodologies is that they have been born completely change-oriented. Therefore, anyone of them is ready for any changing requirements given.



Nowadays nobody doubts of benefits of using agile methodology. In fact, many important companies around the world have already changed or are changing to agile methodologies. The main characteristics of agile methodologies are explained below.

• Modularity

•

: The processes are divided into activities to develop the process.

Iterative

•

: The philosophy of this methodology is focused on the fact that we get things wrong before we get them right, so it is based on short cycles. It is normal that a cycle or iteration do not finish the element 100%, so a new cycle starts. Cycles are repeated any time until the element is finished correctly.

Time bound

•

: Iterations are considered like time unit, so the schedule is based on these iterations. As it is normal that changes happened, all activities of a process in a single iteration are not scheduled. Only the needed activities to achieve the set goal are scheduled at the beginning of the iteration. These activities can be rescheduled if they cannot be completed in the estimated time.

Adaptive

•

: it is considered that changes are normal even good; the agile methodology is focused on making changes in the best way, it is ready for changing.

Incremental

•

: a process does not build the whole system, it is divided into increments. Each increment is tested independently; when an increment is completed and tested, it will be integrated into the system.

People Oriented

•

: Agile methodologies consider people the most important factor of software methodologies because developers that are empowered to raise their productivity, quality, and performance. Team composition is cross-functional and self-organizing without considering any corporate hierarchy. Team members take responsibility for each iteration requirements. Face to face communication is preferred between team members than documentation. Team works in the same office to facilitate communication. Team consist in a small group of 5-9 people to facilitate collaboration and communication. Each team will contain a customer representative that is available for developers to answer iteration questions. At the end of any iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review the progress and re-evaluate priorities in order to optimize the performance and ensure customer needs and company goals.

Collaborative

: The collaboration of all members involved in a process development is needed, so the communication between team members is a crucial point.

There are several agile methodologies. The most used are RAD and Scrum.

• Rapid Application Development (RAD): involves iterative development and the construction of prototyping. Reduces the planning phase in favour of rapid prototyping. Thanks to reduced planning tasks, it is possible to write software faster and make changes easily. The customer has the prototype early so he



can correct the product to fit what he wants. Although with this kind of agile methodology it is possible to lead any kind of project, it is more suitable in short projects.

• Scrum:

For this reason it is so popular. Scrum framework promotes developers teams self-organized and a fluid relationship between team and the product owner. This product owner has the control over the functionalities, requirements, priorities, costs and deadlines.

No doubt, Scrum is most used agile methodology for software developing. Scrum framework is formed by all characteristics of agile philosophy and has been implanted in a lot of enterprises successfully.

The consequence of using scrum framework, and its model based on releasing software frequently, is that the team takes responsibility of the tasks and undertakes them in an iterative way in defined time periods or sprints, improving the software developing productivity.

There are several tools to measure how the project is advancing, between the dates defined in every sprint and in whole project. Some of them are Burn Down Chart or the Visual Management Boards.

Agile methodologies can be completed with a few more technics.

• Extreme Programming:

This approach has some drawbacks, because of unstable requirements, lack of documented compromises or user conflicts, and a lack of documentation or overall design specification.

With this technic, frequently short development cycles are defined to improve productivity. Checkpoints are created in order to add new customer requirements. Programming in pairs or doing extensive code review is recommended, including unit testing of the whole code.



• Visual management:

There are a lot of software solutions to do this, included free software, but the agile standard recommendations say that if in case of the product owner, the scrum master and team are working closely (as a principal roles of scrum framework), the best option is to use a physical board hung in an office wall, where everybody could see it. There are a few kinds of boards, but the most used could be Kanban and scrum boards.

Everything described above can be managed in a different ways and the agile methodologies suggest boards where everybody can know the status of the project at a glance.

4 Software licenses The software license is a kind of contract, which specifies all the rules and conditions of usage of a particular program. Mainly, it stipulates the scope of use, installation, reproduction and copying of these products.



A typical software license grants permission to use one software copy or more. If a user does not have permission and uses the software, he will do a copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright law. There are two types of software licenses: proprietary licenses and free and open source licenses. The differences between them are significant in terms of end-user's rights and obligations. In the next section, the terms of non-open source or proprietary license and open source license are explained.

4.1 Non-Open Source licences Software with non-open source license can be defined like proprietary software distributed under a licensing agreement to authorized users with private modification, copying and republishing restrictions. The cost of this kind of software can vary depending on the complexity of the system. The cost involves the software, integration and services and annual licensing/support fees. The greatest advantages of this kind of software are service and support, so if a user has any problem with the software, there is a point to call for assistance. Software with non-open source licenses is more secure than open source licenses because it is developed in a controlled environment by a team under the same direction.

5 Open Source licenses Software with open source license has the agreement of sharing, reading and editing its source code program by users. Sometimes the meaning of the word "free" is a little bit confused referring to open source software, because of the sense of the word is referring to the freedom to analyse, change or distribute the code in your own necessities. In short, we can make two big groups of open source projects:

• Maintained by an enterprise: in that case it is very common that you can use the code free of cost but you must pay for services, like consulting services, coaching or certification.

• Maintained by the community: in that case there aren't any company behind it. The software is totally maintained and evolved by a software developer’s team, self-organized that they don't earn money directly with this. They just get recognition. The services and software support with this license is provided by the online community network via forums and blogs.



The consolidated open source projects are as reliable as non-open source projects. These projects are totally tested by the developer’s community and they also have installed it in every kind of companies. Some successful open source products are Linux operating systems, Apache software, MySQL data base, Java Virtual Machine, Libre Office, to mention but a few.

6 Kinds of software There are several kinds of problems that enterprise software applications solve. On this chapter, the most common enterprise application will be described in order to explain the solutions that they offer to these common problems

6.1 Business Intelligence (BI) Business Intelligence is a type of software that consists in a set of strategies and tools focus on the knowledge administration and creation, through the data analysis of a company. This concept is referred to the use of company data used to make decisions in the company. It involves the knowledge of how the company works and anticipation of future events, in order to obtain the knowledge needed to make business decisions. The intelligence tools are based on the use of a system information tools. These information tools are created with different data of the data base, with information related to the company and their economic data. The most common case is based on the collection of different data from different sources. After this collection process, some reports, graphics or alerts are automatically generated.



6.2 Collaborative software Collaboration requires individual working together in a coordinated way in order to achieve a common goal. Collaborative software enables multiple users to stay connected and work together on projects from any location. Collaboration software is important nowadays in business because it helps users to communicate and share with each other across different devices and in different locations. This kind of software enables to reduce cost by minimizing the need of travelling. These solutions allow a decentralized workforce to schedule, communicate and share through different mediums, including email, shared calendaring, VoIP services, video conferencing and collaborative documents, intranet, among many other platforms. Collaborative software can be divided into three types:

• Communication: the need to exchange opinions and information. For example, a call phone or chat discussions.

• Conferencing: It refers to interactive work towards a shared objective. • Co-ordination: It refers to the complex interdependent work between the

members of the team.

There are different tools that can be used:

• Electronic communication tools send files, data, messages or documents between the people involved in the same goal. Such as, synchronous conferencing, asynchronous conferencing, e-mail, faxing, voice mail, Wikis and Web publishing.

• Electronic conferencing tools provide the exchange of information in an interactive way, some examples are Internet forums, online chat, instant messaging, telephony, videoconferencing (networked PCs share video and audio signals), data conferencing (networked PCs share a common whiteboard that each user can modify) and application sharing (users can access a shared document or application from their respective computers simultaneously in real time).

• Collaborative management tools help the management of group activities, some tools are electronic calendars (schedule events and automatically notify group members), project management systems (schedule, track, and chart the steps in a project), online proofing (share, review, approve, and reject web proofs, artwork, photos, or videos between designers, customers, and clients), workflow systems (collaborative management of tasks and documents within a knowledge-based business process), knowledge management systems (collect, organize, manage, and share various forms of information).

6.3 Content management system (CMS) A content management system is a computer software used to create, edit, manage and publish content in a system. The most common CMS are typically web focused, and are also named WCMS. The management system generates dynamic web pages interacting with the web server to generate web page under user request with predefined format.



This system allows managing, under a standard format, the information of the server, reducing the management cost of the web page comparing with a static web, where each change in the design has to be made in all web pages, as well as any time that is necessary to modify content, it is necessary to change the layout of html page. In addition to that, this type of system allows the technical users to manage webs platforms in a user friendly environment.

6.4 Customer relationship management (CRM) Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the methodologies and tools that helps to the business to focus on the customer relationship. The main aims are to attract, find, and gain new clients, service and retain old companies. Customer relationship management tools include software that helps the management of relationships between company and users, marketing and sales. With this meaning CRM is referred to the system that manages a data warehouse (data store) with the information of sales management and customers.

6.5 Document management system Document management system is a computer system focused on management of big amount of documents. It usually searches and stores electronic documents or images using security. These documents do not have a clear organization of content. The combination of such documents with indexes documents stores in a database, allow a fast access to the content of the document. Usually, the content is stored compressed, and it can be any type of multimedia content, such as images and videos. A document management application allows documents to relate to each other and give them a common semantic. It provides to search the information in the database and shows related documents. They can access to the documents themselves, or add some other information (meta-information) to make these searches easier. A document management system can be an element of a CRM or ERP System.

6.6 Enterprise resource planning (ERP) Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a business management software that integrates various functions of the process that are essential to running a business, like inventory and order management, finance, accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, human resources, customer relationship management, into one complete system to make process and information faster across the whole organization.



The main objective of ERP is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions of the organization and manage the connections. ERP Systems are divided into many enterprise software modules that are individually purchased, based on the specific needs and technical capability of each organization. The modules can be financial accounting, management accounting, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain management, project management, customer relationship management, data services and access control. The features of an ERP are as follow:

• The main characteristic of all ERP systems is a shared database, which supports all applications.

• An integrated system that runs in real time. • Consistent interface between all the modules. • Offers some degree of synchronized reporting and automation. • Installation of the system without elaborate application integration by the

Information Technology (IT) department.

With an ERP solution, employees have access to accurate information that enables them to make better decisions faster. Also it helps to eliminate redundant processes and systems, lowering the cost of doing business. It is important to mention the advantages and disadvantages of an ERP. Some of the benefits are improving productivity and corporate financial performances, improved business forecasting as well as organized work flows. On the other hand, the disadvantages include the need of an extra budget for the consolidation of all the databases and the need for the development of an efficient re-engineering business plan.

6.7 Issue tracking system Commonly the most of the newly written software contains bugs at the beginning. To monitor bugs, many companies still trust on Word documents and Excel sheets, but these activities are inefficient to manage bugs. An Issue tracking system is the more appropriate solution to improve the process of raising, managing and fixing bugs. Issue tracking system, is a software package that contains a list of issues (tasks, bugs) and do tracks of these issues. These systems create, update and resolve task reported by customer or employees. The system also contains information of each customer, resolutions with commons problems, and others. The architecture of a common issue tracking system consists of a database, which is the main storage repository of data, and a business layer that manages the information. All information is represented in another software application or web page, where the user can creates a new issue, reads an existing issue and adds details to previous ones. Also, It is shown the history of the actions made to fix an issue. Each issue is managed by an user, this information is stored in the application. For security, an issue tracking system will authenticate its users before allowing access to the systems.



6.8 Office automation Office automation involves all software or tools that are related to office or administrative activities. With these tools it is possible to create, collect, store, transfer, manipulate and share digital data. Office automation is focused on providing elements to simplify, improve and automate the organization of the activities of a company, like management of administrative data. The most important part is a LAN (Local Area Network), which allows users to transmit data, mail and even voice across the network. A typical office tool should include the software programs: word processing, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a database and scheduler. Example of office tools are Microsoft office, OpenOffice, AppleWorks.

6.9 Business Project Management (BPM) BPM (Business Process Management) is an approach to making an organization’s workflow more effective, more efficient and more capable of change than a functionality focus. The aims are to reduce human error and miscommunication and focus on stakeholder’s requirement. It is a point of connection in a company between the line-of-business (LOB) and the IT department. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) were both created to facilitate communication between IT and the LOB. Both BPEL and BPMN adhere to the basic rules of programming, so that processes designed in either language are easy for developers to translate into hard code. This approach can be supported through techniques and software tools to ensure the viability of the management in times of stress and change. A business process is a set of activities focus on obtaining a specific organizational goal. These activities can be grouped into six groups: vision, design, model, execution, monitoring and optimization. In short, BPM facilitates that a company redefines and automatizes organizational process, so that, it is needed to fuse process definition (regulatory and organizational component) with the mechanization of those process (Information Systems).