Requirements analysis
Project description
Produce a set of requirements-related documents to meet project expectations on as described in the below case study.
MODULE OUTCOMES ASSESSED BY THIS PIECE OF WORK
.Identify stakeholders and users and their differing requirements
.Apply techniques for investigating requirements including modelling techniques.
Fizzit.com Case Study
Fizzit.com is an online company that sets is vision as “To Be the UK’s Easiest Online trader of Books, CDs and DVDs”. It has a number of sub-goals to help achieve this vision. Fizzit’s aim is to create a strong value proposition for its customers by ensuring that its customers don’t have to do much at all to trade their unwanted products. Fizzit wants to ensure customers get a reasonable price for the products. Fizzit wants to make sure it can also trade on (read: sell) whatever it buys at a reasonable price also; covering its operational costs is vital but also making a small profit.
Fizzit simply asks its customers to enter the barcode/ISBN of a product (CD, DVD, Book, Game) into its website. The Fizzit product should be able to access that product record, return to the customer a price it is willing to pay for the product or whether it does not want the product. This Fizzit calls the ‘one input price return’ goal. Once the Customer has either 10 products entered or a total trade value of over £10, then a trade can proceed. The products are simply delivered to Fizzit who then pay the customer.
Making a small profit
The management of Fizzit plan to take any products traded and on-sell them via a different company (a partner company but an entirely independent legal entity). The World Of Online (TWOO) is an online catalogue product akin to Amazon.co.uk but only dealing in second-hand i.e. used products. TWOO trades in 30 countries and its biggest customer base outside of the UK is both Australia and China. What sells quickly (within 48 hours of going live in the TWOO catalogue) is fed back to the Fizzit database so that it can either update prices or inform customers what it will or will not now trade. Fizzit wants to create a product supply chain for TWOO and it does this by stocking its warehouse on a weekly basis with products it collects from couriers and drop off locations. The hope is TWOO will provide a return value to Fizzit through rapid feedback on what sells and what mark-up Fizzit may be able to make.
Detailed Customer Process on Fizzit
Fizzit works like this: a customer logs in or registers to create an account if a new customer. Immediately the customer is presented with an input box prompting the customer to enter a barcode/ISBN of a product to sell. When a price is returned, the customer moves the item to a ‘trade account’ (or ‘save for later’) and executes the trade. The customer can either take the product (assuming 10 items or a trade value of £10 has been reached) to a delivery drop-off box (there are 10,000 in the UK housed mostly in newsagents / convenience stores) or if it is a very large item (over 25kg and with a trade value of over £25) a courier service will be despatched to pick it up from the customer’s address.
Products are collected and centrally stored in a warehouse in southern England once a week. Here they are checked for quality within 24 hours of arrival. Assuming good quality, the customer’s PayPal account or bank account is credited with the amount of the trade within a further 24 hour period. The customer is informed via an email from Fizzit of the successful trade. There is a no returns policy once the trade is complete. If upon inspection in the warehouse some or all goods are in such disrepair that they cannot be sold easily – in the opinion of Fizzit – then no payment is made to the customer for these specific products; the unsellable products are placed in the nearest drop-off box to the customer’s postal address and an email sent with information about the product rejection and how to pick up the goods. If the product is large the goods are returned via courier. The customer is not charged for the return but is given notice that if goods are found to be not good enough twice more in a calendar year then they will be barred from selling via the site for a calendar year.
The Three Deliverables you must produce are the following:
1. Stakeholder onion model
2. Using the Role Activity Diagram Business Process Modelling notation (Martyn Ould, 1995, 2005, www.veniceconsulting.co.uk) model one of the following business process models described in the case:
• Customer Input Process
• Trading Process
3. Requirements table (identifying business, user, functional and/or quality types). You should be able to identify at a minimum 5 requirements. The requirements should relate to the business process model you have drawn.
