Background
Blue Yonder Airlines is a regional airline that
operates 50 scheduled flights per day. This company anticipates rapid future
growth. Within six months, the company will operate 150 flights per day. Within
one year, it will operate 500 flights per day.
Currently telephone operators handle all reservations. To support the increased
number of flights, the company plans to add an online reservation process.
You are contracted to develop a Microsoft .NET solution that will execute the
new process. Your solution must be operational in five months. It must undergo
one month of testing before it is available to the public. Within one year, it
must be able to support 500 flights per day. To support this expansion,
existing flight numbers might need to be reassigned.
Existing
IT Environment
Currently Blue Yonder Airlines uses an external
vendor to provide flight scheduling services. Fifteen dedicated terminals
communicate with the vendor’s mainframe computer.
The corporate network includes five Microsoft Windows 2000 Server computers and
15 Windows XP Professional computers. A Microsoft Exchange Server computer
provides e-mail services for employees. Internet Information Services (IIS) is
used to support intranet application for the human resources department. This
department is also supported by a dedicated server that has a single
installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
Interviews
IT Department
IT Manager
Currently we have one engineer who is responsible
for maintaining the dedicated terminals and the corporate intranet. In the
future we need to be able to monitor the performance of the new application.
Monitoring will tell us when we need to scale the solution.
Within three months, our scheduling vendor will implement an XML Web service to
give us access to its mainframe computer.
Business Stakeholders
Chief Executive Officer
My vision is to give our customers an easy-to-use,
self-service reservation process. Our new application must provide customers
with the following features:
·
Make
reservations quickly
·
Make
reservations at any time, on any day of the week
·
Store
information in a customer profile, if customers choose
·
Maintain
complete confidentiality of customers profiles
·
Search
for available flights either by airport or by city of origin
·
Create,
save and retrieve an itinerary, without actually booking a flight
·
Retrieve
a saved itinerary and initiate booking for the flights saved in the itinerary
·
Receive
suggestions for alternate flights if the flights saved in an itinerary are no
longer available for booking
·
Receive
an automatic e-mail message to confirm the itinerary after the flights are
booked.
A previous development project required a
considerable amount of rework.
We were unable to find out why the rework occurred. If rework is needed during
this project, we need to know why.
Business Manager
The application should help us provide that we are
receiving a return on our investment. Periodically, detailed usage information
must be logged for analysis. We must be able to turn logging on and of without
recompiling the application.
When the XML Web service is available from our scheduling vendor, we can stop
using dedicated terminals, stop paying a monthly mainframe charge and start
reducing our operating expenses. Typically, that vendor meets its deadlines for
delivering updates only 50 percent of the time.
Finance Department
Chief Financial Officer
Our business model is based in the expansion of our
flight schedules. This project is critical to our continued success. Our budget
is sufficient to implement and support the new application. However, we need to
reduce operating expenses.
Users
Reservations Agent
The current application is very confusing to use.
It requires special keys to perform many functions. It does not offer online
help.
Business Process
Currently customers make reservations by
telephoning a Blue Yonder Airlines reservations agent. The agent uses a
dedicated terminal to connect to the mainframe computer and then completes each
reservation.