Why is it important to use systems analysis and design methodologies when building a system? Why not just build the system in whatever way appears to be “quick and easy”? What value is provided by using an “engineering” approach?
It is important to use system analysis and design methodologies because it will ensure that your work is well thought out, complete, and comprehensible to others on your project team. By following the methodologies, support will be provided for a wide range of tasks, including conducting thorough interviews to determine what your system should do, planning and managing the activities in a systems development project, diagramming the system’s logic, and designing the reports your system will generate.
You cannot just build a system in a way that appears to be quick and easy because if you develop something, put it on the market and it does not work, you will have to take it off the market and will have to fix the problem. By using an engineering approach, you can go through a cycle and go straight to the analysis part to see what is going on and why the system is not performing rather than, going back to square one.
How might prototyping be used as part of the SDLC?
The prototype would be used as part of the SDLC by planning, analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance. Information systems can be analyzed in this circular motion. For example, if you have a system that is fully developed and goes on the market, but does not really work as intended, you can go back to the cycle, see what went wrong, fix the problem so it does not happen again, put the system back on the market, and learn from it.
