System Development Cycle

System Development Cycle

Before the start of the development of the project, the framework of system development processes has to be recognized. There are a number of different paradigms of software development, namely, the waterfall approach, the evolutionary development, formal specification and system assembly from reusable components [SO96]. Among these software development paradigms, the waterfall model is widely used for practical systems development.

System Development Cycle – Waterfall Model

Design Process
As quality of the application depends strictly on the system design, the design model for the project must be carefully selected. The design process involves developing several models of the system at different levels of abstraction [SO96]. Formality and detail are added as the design is developed with constant backtracking to correct earlier, less formal designs. Such feedback mechanism allows earlier designs to be improved.

The design process employed in this project will consist of 4 activities. They are:
(1) Architectural Design
(2) Procedural Design
(3) Database Design
(4) User Interface Design

There is no rigid boundary between the above stages but stage identification is useful to make the design visible and thus allow it to be manageable.

System Design Process

Design Methods
Two design strategies are widely adopted by software design. They are, namely, functional design and object-oriented design.

In this project, functional approach of system design will be followed. And the following structured design methods will be applied to the corresponding level of design as escribed in the previous section.

Data Flow Diagram :- will be applied to Architectural Design where system is modeled using data transformation.
Pseudo Code :- will be applied to Procedure Design to translate DFDs into procedural description.
Entity Relation Model :- will be applied to Database Design to describe the logical data structures employed in this system.

System Design Overview
The Motion Data Acquisition System is designed to help students understand the relationships between motions and kinematics graphs that describe the motions. This system can be integrated into the lesson in many different ways: Lecture demonstrations can be given by teachers to show how real data is collected and analyzed; Hands-on video experiment lets students explore themselves to the videos in their own paces; After-school practices are also possible for low ability students to revise the experiments. Undoubtedly, the Motion Data Acquisition System is a flexible and integrated system that collaborates the teaching and learning activities for kinematics. The following diagram shows the relationships between the Motion Data Acquisition System and its external entities.