Lesson 4.

Analyzing an SRS – A Case study

Introduction
Throughout the last lesson, you learned how to prepare an SRS and what
parts should be included in an SRS. You have also seen that there are
standard templates to be followed when preparing an SRS. You have
been guided to one such template produced by IEEE. This lesson covers
an analysis of a given SRS and identification of main requirements by
going through such SRS.

Learning Outcomes
After completing this lesson you would be able to,
· Analyze an SRS and identify its requirements

3.1 Analysis of an SRS

Let us consider the uploaded SRS prepared by a student. Note that the
SRS is available on the Moodle page under week 04. Here is the link to
the case. What do you think about it? Can you see the title page? As its
title says the SRS describes requirement specification related to a
software called hotel management system.

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Now let us dig into deep. When we go through the section 01, which
gives an introduction to the software system covered in the SRS, we can
see that the given SRS represents what is to be expected from the Hotel
Management System (HMS) to be constructed.

The Scope of this project as mentioned in the SRS is to automate the

major hotel operations. The project focuses on automating, Reservation
and Booking to keep track of reservations and room availability, Tracking
and Selling Food that charges the current room, General Management
Services and Automated Tasks which generates reports to audit all hotel
operations and allows modification of subsystem information. You can
see that it has been mentioned under the scope, users of this system are
the hotel staff (customer service representative) and hotel managers.

Features and details of these automated tasks have been described in

Section 02. Is this an online web-based system? What do you think? No,
it (i.e. the system mentioned in the SRS) is not an online web-based
system. If you analyze the requirements mentioned in the 3.1.2, 3.1.3
and 3.1.4 the system to be implemented is a standalone application,
which requires communication only with back end databases.

But, REMEMBER as a requirement of this course you need to implement

a web-based system.

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When you scroll down you can notice that all functional and non-
functional requirements have been listed out. The design constraint
mentioned in the SRS is “The Hotel Management System shall be a stand-
alone system running in a Windows environment. The system shall be
developed using Java and an Access or Oracle database.” This help the
developers during their system implementation phase.

How can you extend or modify this SRS for the development of an online
hotel management system? I leave it for you. Do it as an activity in this
lesson.

Summary

This lesson covered how to analyse an SRS identify the problem and
features of the software to be implemented. Next will present how to
generate design diagrams using CASE tools.