Background
The School of Fine Art is a large regional
university with more than 45,000 students. Currently, the university manages
course scheduling and course registration by using applications that run on an
AS/400 computer. However, this solution is no longer adequate.
The university has a long-term goal of migrating away from all of its existing
AS/400 applications. You are contracted for a short term goal. You will
replicate and extend the existing functionality course scheduling and course
registration in a new Windows-based solution. Your solution will consist of a
new administrative application and associated user applications. You will
develop the new application by using the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft
SQL Server.
Existing
IT Environment
The university uses two AS/400 applications to
provide the existing functionality for scheduling and registration:
·
A
scheduling application is used by administrators, academic counsellors and
professors to establish and review course schedules for the upcoming academic
term
·
A
registration application is used by students to register for the upcoming
academic term.
Both of these applications use a DB2 database named
REG2. This database contains all current information relating to students,
professors, course schedules and registrations.
Both of these applications can be accessed by using dedicated terminals located
on campus, or by using terminal emulation software on computers that are
connected to the university network. Both applications will be replaced as part
of the new solution.
The university has two additional AS/400 applications, which were developed by
a single software vendor:
·
A
grading application is used by professors to assign course grades to students
at the end of each academic term
·
A
transcript application is used by administrators to generate official student
transcripts
The grading application and the transcript
application use a DB2 database named TRANS2. This database contains records of
all courses completed by each student and all grades received by each student.
TRANS2 and the associated applications will not be replaced.
Four registration periods occur each year. Each registration period begins one
month before the beginning of an academic term. Registration closes when the
term begins. A summary of student enrolment data is then exported by a batch
export operation from REG2 to TRANS2.
Interviews
Business Stakeholders
Director, Department of Registrars
We want to make it impossible for students with
overdue tuition accounts to register for courses.
Project Manager
Currently, students must wait in long lines to use
dedicated terminals or on-campus computers during each registration period. We
want to enable students to register over the Internet. In addition, we want to
enable professors, academic counsellors and administrators to access the new
administrative application over the internet.
Users
Director, Department of South Asian Art
Our existing scheduling application lets us specify
prerequisite courses only in a very simple way. We can specify prerequisite
relationships of the following type: "ARTHI 101 and ARTHI 202 are required
before registering for ARTHI 303". However, we need to be able to specify
more complex prerequisite relationships, such as "ARTHI 101 and ARTHI 202
are required, or ARTHI 301 is required, before registering for ARTHI 303".
Currently, a student cannot register for a course if it is fully enrolled or if
the student has not completed the prerequisites. The professor who currently
teaches a course section can issue various waivers. One type of waiver
authorizes a student to register in a course section that is fully enrolled.
Another type authorizes a student to register for a course section without
completing the prerequisites.
Currently a professor issues a waiver by signing a paper form and sending it to
the IT department. However, we want the new administrative application to
enable professors to issue waivers online. After a professor issues an online
waiver, the student should be able to register for the appropriate course.
Academic Counsellor
If a student transfers from another university, the
student’s academic history will not exist in TRANS2. This omission can cause
problems with prerequisite requirements. Academic counsellors must be able to
use the new administrative application to issue prerequisite waivers on the
basis of our own evaluation of a student’s academic history. When an academic
counsellor issues a waiver, it must apply to all sections of a course, except
for sections that are fully enrolled.
IT Department
IT Manager
High availability is critical to the success of
this solution. We can have no single point of failure. For maximum scalability
and flexibility, we do not want any Web server session affinity.
AS/400 Application Support Engineer
Initially, the IT department will generate an XML
file to populate the new SQL Server database from REG2.
At the end of each registration period, we must be able to import into TRANS2 a
list of all courses for which a student is registered. We need this information
in an XML file format. All information about courses that students have already
completed must be stored only in TRANS2.
At the end of each registration period, all course registration information for
students should be archived and then removed from the SQL Server database.
We have the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2, which will enable access to
student transcript data from TRANS2.
Accounting Application Support Engineer
Each course is worth between one and six credits.
Tuition for each term is calculated on the basis of the total number of credits
for which a student is registered during that term. Information about student
tuition accounts is stored in an Oracle database named Accounting. This
database is located on the same intranet that the new solution will use.
Whenever a student adds or drops a course, the new student registration
application must update the credit information for the student in Accounting.
The credit data in Accounting must reflect the total number of credits for
which the student is registered.
We can also provide the SQL statements needed to update credit data and to
establish whether a student’s tuition account is past due. We have an OLE DB
provider for Oracle and Oracle supports the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator
(MS DTC).
Business
Process
Courses and Course Sections
The university offers thousands of different
courses each year. Each course has a name (for example, Introduction to Art
History), a department code (for example, ARTHI), a three-digit course number
(for example, 101) and a number of credits (for example, 5). Each course is
taught in one or more sections.
However, not all courses are taught every term. Zero, one, or more than one
section of any course might be offered in any given term. Therefore, the
professor, section identifier, location, meeting time and maximum student count
are properties of a section of the course rather than of the course itself.