Saturday 2 May 2009

ISEB Certificate in Systems Development (Agile) Essentials... Done!!!

I am so so so happy all is working out so well! I have now done 4 of the courses and have just the oral to go! Yippee!!! I did the course on the 25th-26th of April, it was soooo coool! I used to think Agile was some kind of hardware in a computer! lol! OMG! I am so funny... it isn't. The course was done in another location. I did not like the food at this location but i absolutely loved the layout of the room. It helped my concentration 100%! It was a conference room layout as opposed to the usual classroom layout which meant some people were having their own meetings at the back!

This as opposed to that!

Course Overview:
Systems Development Essentials provides Business Analysts with a good grounding in systems investigation and quality assurance - the underpinning of successful systems development. The course examines the fundamental differences between object-oriented and structured systems development and differentiates between generic lifecycle types, methods and approaches. Key areas such as designing test cases for the requirements, identifying different architectures for system development solutions and how CASE tools can be used to support the method selected are explored.
Holders of the ISEB Certificate in Systems Development Essentials should be able to:
-Identify the tasks and disciplines required for systems development and implementation.
-Investigate a system
-Interpret business requirements and produce systems requirements
-Quality assure the systems requirements documentation
-Design test cases for the requirements
-Describe the commonly-used development lifecycles defined in the syllabus.
-Describe in detail one methodology that embraces one (or more) of these lifecycles
-Describe the structure and activities of this methodology
-Describe, interpret and quality assure the key models that the selected methodology uses for defining the process, static and event perspectives of the system
-Make effective use of different methods of interpersonal communications.
-Quality assure the systems requirements documentation
-Identify different architectures for systems development solutions
-Conduct a system review
-Explain how CASE tools might be used to support the method

We discussed agile methods and using DSDM and SCRUM as examples.
Some useful reading I did before the course were:
http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html

andhttp://www.softhouse.se/Uploades/Scrum_eng_webb.pdf gives a good overview of the popular method Scrum
http://www.dsdm.org/ lets you download an old version of the dsdm manual
and there are loads of articles here:http://agilealliance.org/articles . I also read a bit on UML even though it was covered last week in the Requirements course.


ISEB Certificate in Systems Development Essentials
Course Syllabus

1. Roles in systems development
o The purpose, objectives and tasks of systems development
o Roles and actors in systems development
o Technical and interpersonal skills of the analysts
o The emergence of skills frameworks (SFIA+)
o The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
2. Systems architecture
o Enterprise, systems and infrastructure levels of architecture
o The Zachman Framework
o Inputs at an enterprise level (EAP)
o Inputs at system and infrastructure level
o Components of an EAP methodology
3. Development approaches
o Bespoke development
o Commercial off the shelf (COTS) software package solutions
o Configuring and customising COTS software package solutions
o Component-based systems development
o Service-based systems development
4. Systems development lifecycles
o Waterfall model
o V model
o Incremental model
o Spiral model
o Advantages and disadvantages of each approach
o Selection of an appropriate approach
5. Methodologies
o Traditional and structured approaches
o Agile Development / Rapid Application Development / eXtreme Programming
o The Unified Process (UP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
o Models of the UML
o Interpretation of
o Use case diagram
o Use case description
o Class diagram
o Sequence diagram
o Phases of the Unified Process
o Workflows of the Unified Process
6. Systems Investigation
o Fact finding approaches:
o Workshops
o Prototyping
o Interviewing
o Questionnaires
o Scenario analysis
o Other approaches
o Functional requirements definition
o Non-functional requirements definition
o Documenting requirements
o Human aspects of systems investigation and introducing change
7. Systems design, implementation and maintenance
o Aspects of the production environment
o Design principles and constraints (legal, ethical, financial)
o The tasks of implementation
o Sign off and hand over
o Post-implementation reviews
o Different types of maintenance
8. Quality Assurance
o Definitions of software quality
o The V model
o Requirements-driven testing
o Static Testing: types of walkthrough and inspection
o Post-project reviews
o Service Level Agreements
9. CASE and CAST tools
o Features of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Computer Aided Software Testing (CAST) tools
o Life-cycle coverage
o Requirements traceability
o Advantages and disadvantages


Also, this video on Youtube "SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes "by Hamid of http://www.axosoft.com/ helped me a great deal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5k7a9YEoUI

1 comment:

  1. As a BATrainee myself, I hope to write the ISEB qualifications,but the courses are confusing and I don't know which ones to concentrate on. I see you've decided to write them all! Very impressive.

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