Shorecliff College, a liberal arts college located on the West Coast, provides dormitory housing for approximately half of its students. Students who choose not to live on campus, or who do not get assigned dormitory space, must find housing in the surrounding community. Currently, the housing office uses a cumbersome system of multiple binders to keep track of housing opportunities for students, faculty, and staff of the college. Housing listings are for both university-owned housing and for housing owned by private parties. The current system is difficult to maintain and keep up-to-date. The new college president approved a request to fund the development of a system to provide easier access and maintenance of listings. You are the systems analyst assigned from the college IT department to conduct the initial investigation into the feasibility of such a system. The preliminary investigation reports resulted in approval for you to proceed with the systems analysis phase.

Background

Director

Based on your information gathering to date, you have determined the following about a listing system for the housing office at Shorecliff College:

The current listing system revolves around multiple copies of three binders of housing listings. These are separate binders for undergraduate listings, graduate listings, and faculty/staff listings. Within each binder are copies of listings available to a particular group. Listings either are generated by the college housing office from their own housing units, or from private landlords who call the housing office to list housing vacancies. In addition, students or other groups of people who have rooms available in a residence may list the room.

Each listing contains the following information: type of housing (apartment, house, condo, etc.), number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, other rooms, handicap features, other features, rent, security deposit, utilities, date of availability, lease term, landlord name and contact information, and restrictions on rental (gender, etc). Each property may be listed in any or all of the binders, to allow the listing party to direct their listing to their target audience.

When the college rents a property, the listing is removed from all binders in which it appears. Private landlords are asked to call in when a property is rented to facilitate the removal of that listing from the binders. People using the binders who find housing listings that already have been rented are asked to report those so they can be removed. The binders are reviewed at the end of each month by the housing office staff, and private listings older than 2 months are removed.

The biggest problems that the housing office encounters are:

1. Listings not being removed from all binders upon rental. There are five copies of each binder to accommodate the large number of people seeking housing, and often a binder is missed when rented properties are being culled from the binders.
2. Listings being removed from the binders prior to being rented, by people trying to reduce competition for desirable properties. During the peak housing search periods of April/May and August, this is a significant problem.

Based on the results of your information gathering, the next step is to develop a logical model of the proposed listing system.

Task to do

1. Prepare a context diagram for the new system.
2. Prepare a diagram 0 DFD for the new system.
3. Prepare at least one diagram 1 DFD from the results of #2 (more than one will garner extra credit)
4. Write a brief memo that explains the importance of leveling and balancing a set of DFDs.