Week 5

Have just discovered I hadn't yet posted about week 5; shall do so now.

This week's lecture consisted mainly of diagrams. Lots of DFDs in particular. They started with level 0 (context diagram) which is an event partitioned system model, through to logical and physical DFDs. I did learn some bits and pieces - I didn't realise that the numbering on DFDs is purely identification, and I'd never thought of a DFD as being broken into "fragments", I'd only thought of them as subsystems. I like the idea of fragments better. I also had never heard of applying the 7+-2 rule to DFDs. Its a rule I know quite a bit about from year 12 Psychology (a subject I miss very much) and does make sense. Along with the fact that lines shouldn't be crossing on high quality DFDs, a rule which I have broken in the past :(

I had also never heard of the black hole and miracle problems. A black hole is where information goes in but never comes out (i.e. is an unnecessary data input), and a miracle is an impossible data output. (I do like the fact they have rather obvious names to remember, should make life easier come exam time, and not to mention black holes has me thinking of the film Zathura, which my brother had on the other day when he was sick.)

We also looked at information engineering (another method of design which believes data is more important than the process), process dependency diagrams and activity-location and activity-data matrixes.

Overall the lecture was pretty good, followed by a tutorial that wasn't too bad, but I can't remember much about it! Was pushed of my brain slightly by coming home and finding a virus on my USB key, which was different to the one they were having issues with in the labs. Anyway, was a pretty good week SAD wise :)