Case Study

Phala Phala Farming University (2PFU) is a higher education institution located in the outskirts of BelaHotWaters area. It specialises in agricultural programmes offered in three of its departments: livestock farming, game farming and animal auctioneering.

Its Academic Administration, which is the starting point for any student's academic journey at 2PFU at any of the three departments, forms an integral part of their journey at the university. This environment assists students from the recruitment phase through to enrolment, registration, examinations and graduation. An administration system to cater for all these functions is required.

The section below provides a narration of some of the activities of enrolment, specifically the part of the system which is required to handle the processing of applications.

An applicant or prospective student will complete an online application by filling in the required details and uploading the required documents such as identification proof and grade 11 or 12 results. The applicant should also pay an application fee, the proof should be uploaded. On completion of the application the applicant will receive a student number by SMS and a pin, which can later be used to track or view the application. In the back office, the administrative officer is able to view applications and process them. The finance officer has to verify each application for the payment of an application fee by comparing the uploaded proof of payment and a corresponding payment reflecting on the finance system. To process applications, on a daily basis the administrative officer generates a list of applications. Then they open/view each application to check the completeness of the application, by verifying the uploaded results (grade 11 or 12) and identification documents. The officer has reported that some applicants upload incorrect documents such as their photos, newspaper clips and grade R reports. On completion of the verification of the completeness of an application, they update the application status to either Awaiting Admission status, Pending documents or Not ready for processing. At the end the Senior Officer of administration runs an admission script for each correctly verified (Awaiting Admission status), which then updates the application to either Admitted, Admitted with Conditions or Does not meet Requirements. At the right time, the Senior Office runs bulk generation of letters to inform applicants if they have been accepted or rejected.

QUESTION 1

Analyse the case study and provide the following outputs to compile a requirements document:

1. Functional Decomposition Diagram for the Academic Administration environment.

2. Business process model to provide an end-to-end view for the handling of applications.

3. Use case diagram. You may apply any technique that you find suitable to identify the use cases and actors. Although there are no marks allocated for applying the technique, students are encouraged to provide evidence of how they arrived at the use cases.

4. Domain class diagram.

5. Use case description. Select one extensive or moderately extensive use case from your use case diagram and provide a complete narration using a use case description.

6. System sequence diagram for the use case in 5.

7. State machine diagram showing transitions of an application.

8. CRUD matrix for mapping use cases and classes.

9. Extended Sequence diagram for the use case in 5.

10. Design class diagram for the use case in 5.