Challenging Students: Reflections on the Development and Delivery of an Undergraduate Module That Introduces the Full Systems Development Life Cycle

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2006 by McRobb, Steve

We will call the groups Technicos and Informaticos and for simplicity, and at the risk of some over-simplifcation, we will characterise them as follows (most readers will recognise some of the cultural and political composition of their own faculties).

Technicos generally emphasise technical skills and precision, and might define the key aims of a computing degree course as: to equip students to formulate a clear and unambiguous statement of a problem, to specify a technological solution to that problem, and to use the most appropriate technology available to implement that solution in an effective way. DMU's Technicos saw our key academic problem as a decline in students' technical ability, especially their programming and networking skills. The solution was a return to intellectual, especially mathematical, foundations; for example, more emphasis on programming, algorithms and data structures, and a partial restoration of structured approaches to analysis and design.

Informaticos agree up to a point on the need for intellectual and technical rigor. But they also take a wider view of the nature of systems, and thus of systems development. Success is seen as critically dependant on a deep understanding of the needs of users, clients and other stakeholders of a system, both those that are given explicitly and those that are implicit in the context. Where this understanding is missing, inappropriate systems will be developed regardless of the developer's technical skills. Students need to integrate their knowledge and diverse skills within an overall framework. This ties in with some skills and knowledge that employers value in all graduates, irrespective of discipline: project management, understanding of project lifecycles, project deliverables, group working, communication and research skills, and systems analysis and design approaches.

Viewing the curriculum design problem from this perspective, a meeting of the Information Systems subject team noted that:

"Certain problems with the current curriculum were identified; these tend to manifest themselves in the final year (and via placement employer feedback), for example final year students across all Computing courses who:

* "are unable to make a coherent link between the different parts of the systems lifecycle;

* "are unable to construct documents such as a Feasibility Study, Requirements Specification, Design Document;

* "know nothing about research skills;

* "and who are therefore insufficiently equipped to approach their final year project, never mind professional practice!" (Prior, 2002)

The strategy proposed to address this was a new first year module called "Systems Development":

"Covering the whole lifecycle from project initiation, through analysis, design, to implementation. Students to acquire an overview of the entire lifecycle, to understand key deliverables such as Feasibility Study, Requirements Specification, Design Specification and learn an approach to project management. A generic approach to be taken.