QUALITY SYSTEMS IN IT
Case Study Assessment
S.T.U. Number
Module Name
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Table of Contents
- National and international quality standards applicable to the development of the digital dashboard. 3
- A critical assessment of the development of the dashboard against internationally identified best practices. 4
- Discussion of the risk associated with the development of the digital dashboard from a global private bank 6
- Description of the system development life cycle as it applies to the development of the digital dashboard. 6
Introduction
The emergence of innovation, technological advancement can be witnessed. This has led to the development of electronic tools through which the organisations can achieve a competitive edge. Thereby, it will also help in the achievement of desired objectives using such advancements. According to Gremyr et al. (2020), it has been construed that the Digital Dashboard is the electronic interface through which the data aggregation and visualisation are possible using various sources such as locally hosted files, web services, and databases. It permits the organisation to analyse the business’s performance by showing the external data, real-time data, and historical trends. As per the given case study, the client advisors at the global private bank focus on the improvement of the consulting experience. The bank has the objective of developing the new digital dashboard, which can assist in consultative processes, understand the clients’ holistic opinion, and receive the alerts. Your study is based on preparing a report for the project of a digital dashboard for Wealth Management. The report reflects on addressing the risks, quality standards, documentation, relevant project management tools, ethical considerations, legal considerations, and system development life cycle approach. The responsibility is to act as the I.T. quality consultant and assist in achieving the project’s objectives.
Question 1
a. National and international quality standards applicable to the development of the digital dashboard.
Quality assurance is regarded as the activity to ensure that the organisation can provide the best services or products to the customers. The main focus of quality assurance is on improving the processes so that the quality services can be delivered to the clients (Simoes 2016). It is the organisation’s responsibility to ensure that effective methods are used by taking into consideration the quality standards that have been considered for software products. It is also known as Q.A. testing. In addition to this, quality standards are the document that provides the guidelines, specifications, characteristics, and requirements that can be used regularly to ensure that the services, processes, products, and materials meet the objectives (Joss et al. 2017). These standards provide the organisations with the shared vision, vocabulary, understanding, and procedures required to fulfill the stakeholders’ expectations. These standards offer an authoritative and objective basis for the consumers and organisations worldwide for conducting the business with an effective communication process.
ISO 9000 reflects on the quality assurance aspects in general terms, which can apply to any of the businesses irrespective of the products and services offered (Cai and Jun 2018). ISO 9000 is the set of quality standards which is developed for quality assurance. To improve the digital dashboard, it is essential to follow the ISO 9000 quality standards. It is adopted by more than 60 nations, including European community members such as the United States, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, South America, etc. The organisations need to be registered through ISO. Digital development can be stated as ISO- complaint if the processes address the areas which are recognised in the standard. It should be documented and practised based on the measure. If the process is adequately documented, it will help the organisation comprehend, manage, and improve the process. The quality standards areas which are considered for the development of digital dashboard are configuration management, change control, development planning, quality planning, implementation and design, maintenance, testing, and validation.
In addition to this, there are various quality standards and testing needed to be performed so that the digital dashboard can be developed and certified.
Level 1: At the first level, the offline software is determined and checked to ascertain the violation level of the official rules of coding. Also, it focuses on the evaluation of documentation along with the in-code level comments.
Level 2: The level includes checking the compilation of the software and connecting all the operating systems and official platforms.
Level 3: At this level, it is essential to evaluate that the digital dashboard is running correctly in the presence of different conditions, which involves large and small event size, and a certain number of events, etc.
Level 4: This is the final level in which the software performance is checked, whether it matches the performance level specified earlier.
b. A critical assessment of the development of the dashboard against internationally identified best practices.
The development of useful dashboards as per the best practices requires a culmination of the comprehensive process of business intelligence, which covers the requisites’ collection to create a data model. On the other hand, the significance of developing the proper dashboard is essential as a polar designed one can fail to convey the relevant information and knowledge along with making the data less meaningful. Following are the best practices which needs to be considered while developing the dashboard:
The 5-second rule: While developing the dashboard, the 5-second rule can be followed. This is the time taken by the critical stakeholders for searching the information by examination of the dashboard. According to Mackie et al. (2020), it has been evaluated that the ad-Hoc investigation is a time-consuming process. However, the significant metrics which is generally required by the user of the dashboard need to be pop from the screen immediately.
Logical layout: While building the dashboard, it is vital to follow certain principles related to organising. This includes an inverted pyramid. It is the concept that has developed from journalism, and it segregates the data into three segments with the least significant at the bottom, and the substantial data is on the top. In the middle section, there is important information that assists in understanding the overview. At the bottom, the pyramid includes background and general data.
Minimalism: Some individuals develop the dashboard while focusing on too many details and try to include everything in the dashboard to show a fuller picture. According to cognitive psychology theory, it has been stated that the human brain can only understand more or less seven images at one time. More visuals than that detract or distract the individuals from their intended purpose.
Selection of right data visualisation: At the time of selecting the visualisation, it is necessary to adopt the appropriate type of data to consider the essential purpose. This includes relationship, comparison, composition, and distribution. The relationship is the connection between two or more variables. Comparison is comparing the variables side by side. The composition is breaking the data into different components. Distribution is a grouping and ranging the values in the available data. It is essential to choose any one type of information which is to be relayed before selecting visualisation.
Question 2
a. Discussion of the risk associated with the development of the digital dashboard from a global private bank
There are significant risks that are faced by the banks. This includes operational risk, liquidity risk, market risk, credit risk, and other associated risks (Badawi, 2017). All banks, including the global private banks, are exposed to different levels and types of risk, which creates the requirement of well-constructed management of risk along with following the government regulations. This also involves a risk of using the digital dashboard in the private bank. Despite being useful in transforming the repository data inform of the consumable information. There is various risk attached to the development of dashboards and its implementation. As posited by Catolino et al. (2019), it is found that the artefacts involve more of textual data such as commit messages, bug reports, requirement specifications.
When the software developers present the information on the dashboard of the textual artefacts, it is considered to be less trivial. However, the techniques used for aggregation of the textual information like the summarisation algorithms or topic modelling do not show adequate results. Hence, numbers instead of textual data are easier to display on the dashboard. This has resulted in including information in the dashboard more about issues that have been closed instead of the data based on the features that are mentioned in the bug reports. These challenges can be addressed by making advances in the processing research related to the text, mainly similar artefacts of the software projects.
Moreover, the information aggregation reflects missing the details, which implies that all the contextual information is not available on the dashboard. In addition to this, in case if the dashboard shows a report about the critical bug fix, all the caveats might not be included in the information. Also, the dashboard does not explain adequately. For instance, the dashboard might highlight that one team is having more issues and the other team. However, the explanation might not be provided by the dashboards for such observations. Hence, it is impossible to take relevant actions in the absence of the proper interpretation of the issues. For example, the team might fail to evaluate the problems that need to be addressed.
b. Description of the system development life cycle as it applies to the development of the digital dashboard.
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is defined as the process which is followed by the software projects in the organisations (Rani, 2017). It involves a detailed plan that focuses on the development, maintenance, replacement, alterations, and enhancement of particular software. It focuses on the methodology for improvement of the software quality along with the overall process of development. It includes the complete plan explaining the development, replacement, and maintenance methods for the specific software system. There are certain phases of the software cycle in a particular order in which it is executed. These phases include planning, collecting the requirements, designing, developing, and validating, deploying, and maintaining.
A dashboard is an essential tool for regularly monitoring the organisation’s performance (Ferretti, 2017). Using the single digital interface, decision-makers have the accessibility to the actionable information, which is the key performance indicators. This can be implemented to evaluate the performance of the business. With the help of the system development life cycle, which needs to be considered for the project, it will become easier to implement the digital dashboard successfully. The process includes planning, designing, building, and deploying the dashboard. The order of the task will be the same irrespective of the technology selected for the development. All the phases are essential and need to be completed to ensure that the dashboard’s deployment and implementation can be done successfully.
Fig 1: Digital Dashboard development SDLC Methodology
Plan: The planning phase requires sufficient time for delivering quality work and practical completion of the project. This involves the identification of the team members and allotting them the roles as well as the overall objective of the project. In this case, it is the development of the digital dashboard in a global private bank.
Requirements gathering: It is the scope of the dashboard project. After the completion of the planning, requirement gathering process starts. It is essential to understand the needs and requirements of the critical stakeholders of the project. The dashboard helps in providing the user with various methods to display the data graphically.
Design: When the dashboard appearance and content is decided, it is essential to focus on design. This includes refining the user interface along with the control flow. The sources of the data also confirm for each of the data elements. When the historical painting information is needed, the data persistence method is also determined. In addition to this, the design involves defining the queries required to retrieve various elements of the data.
Build and validate: It involves the development of the project with the involvement of various activities that are coordinated with one another carefully. The event includes front end implementation, query implementation, configure scheduling security and refresh, and dashboard validation.
Deploy: When the development and testing of the dashboard are done, there is the phase of deployment. It is essential to implement security requirements in the business environment. Also, the corporate network environment is needed to be integrated. This involves portal framework consideration, accessibility by the customers, and extranets for the partner.
Maintain: Ongoing maintenance is also one of the phases of dashboard development. There is a high possibility of changes in the expectation and requirements of the dashboard. Its solution should be open and flexible to permit the enhancements request.
Question 3
a. Description of the product specification of the digital dashboard
References
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Gremyr, A., Gäre, B.A., Greenhalgh, T., Malm, U., Thor, J. and Andersson, A.C., 2020. Using Complexity Assessment to Inform the Development and Deployment of a Digital Dashboard for Schizophrenia Care: Case Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(4), p.e15521.
Cai, S. and Jun, M., 2018. A qualitative study of the internalization of ISO 9000 standards: The linkages among firms’ motivations, internalization processes, and performance. International Journal of Production Economics, 196, pp.248-260.
Joss, M.K., Eeftens, M., Gintowt, E., Kappeler, R. and Künzli, N., 2017. Time to harmonize national ambient air quality standards. International journal of public health, 62(4), pp.453-462.
Rani, S.B.A.S.U., 2017. A detailed study of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) models. International Journal Of Engineering And Computer Science, 6(7).
Ferretti, M., Parmentola, A., Parola, F. and Risitano, M., 2017. Strategic monitoring of port authorities activities: Proposal of a multi-dimensional digital dashboard. Production Planning & Control, 28(16), pp.1354-1364.
Catolino, G., Palomba, F., Zaidman, A. and Ferrucci, F., 2019. Not all bugs are the same: Understanding, characterizing, and classifying bug types. Journal of Systems and Software, 152, pp.165-181.
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Badawi, A., 2017. Effect of Credit Risk, Liquidity Risk, and Market Risk Banking to Profitability Bank (Study on Devised Banks in Indonesia Stock Exchange). European Journal of Business and Management, 9(29), pp.1-8.