Nature of organisations including: IT requirements, major information flows within them and the role of the IS function.
Techniques for investigating systems including: Interviewing, statistical analysis of data, questionnaire design and analysis.
The Development Lifecycle including: project lifecycles, project development standards and quality assurance.
System modeling including: the use of an appropriate structured methodology that incorporates entities, their attributes and relationships; functions and their logical and time dependent relationships, e.g. SSADM.
Specification and design of a physical model including: mapping logical models to physical, checking for normalisation, specification of functions both automatic and manual, human-computer interface (HCI) specification; quantification and evaluation of alternative solutions; other design considerations.
Implementation of systems design including: prototyping, use of RDBMS, CASE tools, query languages and interface builders.
Security issues including approaches to enhance both hardware and software security, the Data Protection Act, etc., and its implications for IS.
Professional issues including the professional skills expected of a systems developer.

Key note lectures and demonstrations.
Tutorials and practicals to develop skills and techniques needed for:
Intensive period which involves groups working to develop a case study application system.
The examination will test a broad spectrum of the course.
(1:n) (1:25)2

Group coursework - 50%, maximum 30 sides of A4. (Learning outcomes 1 and 2). Group coursework involves the analysis, design and implementation of a required information system based on a given case study.
Exam - 50% (Learning outcomes 2, 3 and 4).

None

Software System Development A gentle introduction, Carol Britton, Jill Doake, McGraw Hill (4th Edition), 2006, ISBN-10: 0-07-711103-6
SQL Fundamentals, John Patrick, Prentice Hall (2nd Edition), 2002, ISBN: 0-13-066947-1

RDBMS e.g.Oracle.
CASE tool e.g. Select - SSADM Professional