Bead Bar Sdlc

Bead Bar is a company that sells bead jewelry to customers at their stores and franchises. Customers come into the store, sit at a bar and design bead jewelry. Currently Bead Bar is using an antiquated paper system for ordering, invoicing, and employee records. This current system is inefficient and is causing problems with lost orders, incorrect invoicing and many hours of lost time researching data while going through papers. Bead Bar's management has decided to move into the direction of globalization by going to an Information Management System and an E-commerce site.

Bead Bar's information system will need to support six studios, five franchise stores, and Bead Bar onboard which is a mobile store that is easily loaded onto and off of cruise ships. The goal of Bead Bar's information system is to improve and stream line daily tasks and operations ranging from automatic ordering, employee benefit tracking, trend analysis and other information sharing. Bead Bar has hired an analyst to help plan and implement an information system by using a systems development life cycle (SDLC). This system upgrade will include hardware and software requirements, designing a network topology allowing communication throughout the company, telecommunication systems using local area network (LAN) internet capabilities, and wide area network (WAN). Other upgrades will include a database management system for record keeping.

The traditional systems development life cycle (SDLC) is a system development methodology (SDM) that contains seven phases: (1) planning, (2) systems analysis, (3) systems design, (4) development, (5) testing, (6) implementation, and (7) maintenance (Malaga, 2005). This is also referred to as the waterfall model. Each phase should be completed before moving on to the next phase to ensure quality control. If a mistake is made in one step and found before moving on then the problem should be easier to fix. If a problem is not discovered until testing or implementation then several phases would need to be re-accomplished.

The first phase is planning. In this stage an analyst is hired to propose a system, develop a budget and determine the feasibility on four levels: (1) technical determines what technologies exist or if new technology has to be developed. This will also determine the experience of the organization to operate the new system. (2) economic feasibility will determine whether a company can afford the system and what the return might be. (3) An operational feasibility will determine how willing the users are to using a new system.