Customer Reviews

Systems Analysis and Design Methods

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have taught systems analysis and design methods for four years using this text or its previous editions. It has its strong and weak points. It covers the basics very well, and gives the students a good grounding in classical techniques. The authors have done a lot to include object-oriented techniques in the 6th and 7th editions. This meets my prefered approach since both techniques have their value, and analysts need to be familiar with both.
However, there are weaknesses. The authors focus on more traditional applications, with less coverage of more recent developments than I would like. Yes, they discuss web applications and some e-commerce elements, but it is "bolted on" and not well integrated into the methodology. Much of their GUI design sections need to be updated with a more web-centric approach, as most applications are going that way.
Finally, they fail to address in any substantive way how analysts shoud address the modern security needs around data integrity, user authentication, user authorization, the related access control issues, data privacy, appropriate use of encryption, and last but certaintly not least, backup and recovery of data content. It is my opinion that each of these topics need to be built into the process, not bolted on, and that to do this, it should be integral to the training of the analyst. These ommissions lead to my rating of 4 stars for an otherwise excellent text.

This is my first review on Amazon; I'm writing to point out some serious issues which have not been addressed by the previous 13 reviews.
To begin, I'm a second semester grad student in IS and this is the required text for my Systems Analysis & Design class.
I am now in my 7th week of class, and about halfway through the book. Others have mentioned that this book is overly broad and not deep enough - this is an understatement. I can only vaguely describe some of the stages of systems analysis. The problem, as I see it, is that the authors (un)creatively decided to use an iterative, rather than sequential, approach to teaching the subject matter. Chapters 1 and 3 present the main ideas. Chapter 5 goes into more detail about those same ideas, repeating some (but not all) of what was already discussed. I'm presently on Chapter 7 and can't decide if what is being discussed is even further elaboration of previous chapters. Why not have the subject matter be more sequential, like every other college textbook? Because iteration is one approach to systems analysis and design and the authors thought it a good idea to use this approach for a textbook.
Another negative effect of this approach is redundancy and lack of depth. Iteration not only makes it difficult for the newcomer to ascertain whether the current chapter's topic is new or not, it also takes a toll on a student's confidence. I believe that if the layout had been sequential, there would be more room for depth and clarity, not mention making the reading flow more naturally.
I am quite interested in learning the subject. But I'm almost halfway through the semester and I still don't know how or where to begin and proceed with the process. I've even downloaded and reviewed the supplementary material available on the authors' website.
If you're a teacher, please do your students a favor and consider another text. This might be somewhat palatable to computer programmers, engineers, or other highly technical folks but not all Information Science students come from these fields.

Whitten and Bentley have put together a very good text for a one-semester intro to systems analysis. After a wide-ranging introductory section, the real meat of this book appears in Parts 2 and 3: Analysis and Design.

Part 2 spends just one chapter on requirements discovery. This is the one section of the book that I found a lot thinner than it should be. The first problem is that requirements engineering is a field all its own, and has (or should have) direct connections to every work product that comes after in the development cycle. Although later chapters (especially use cases and even protoyping) offer additional ways to elicit meaningful requests from users, the whole task of making sure that the requirements are complete, consistent, and traceable to downstream effort is barely addressed. The second, and I think bigger problem is that the authors talk only about requirements from the users, plus "non-functional" requirements like reliability and performance. There's a lot to debate in categorizing requirements as non- or functional, depending on the kind of application, but the real defect in the discussion is one they share with most other authors in the field: they simply ignore the standards and regulations that affect system development. The SEC, FAA, and FDA impose requirements, as do legal enactments (HIPAA, ITAR for crypto, Sorbanes-Oxley), look&feel, and standards for networking, data exchange, and a gazillion other areas. Depending on the field you work in, you'll spend a lot more time worrying about regulatory and standards compliance than about anything the customer said.

Despite this uninspiring start, Part 2 moves along well. It presents use cases (though in a particularly fussy way), modeling techniques, and enough UML to help but not enough to overwhelm - and the whole can be quite overwhelming.

Part 3 addresses high level design. If your classroom is a typical one, this is where the students students with little, no, or ancient programming experience may start to struggle. It does a fair job with the common kinds of human-oriented IO, even if it shortchanges other systems with more intricate kinds of data manipulation (e.g. compilers or weather modeling). Because this addresses analysis as a separate task from programming, the authors have no reason to go into a lot of directly codable depth. This will frustrate the techies, but the little depth that it does address might intimidate thosewith more of a business orientation. It's a problem that I think has no solution as long as the people who build systems and the people who want them are in the same classroom.

Finally, Part 4 acknowledges the fact that systems are not just designed. Although it skips deployment and maintenance, this section does touch on low-level implementation and day to day operations. Now that they've gotten away from the core requirements, specification, and design content, I think the authors are making a quiet suggestion to the instructor who uses this book: it's your curriculum, add your spin to it. Everyone who looks this text over will see soft spots, but I'll bet that no two people see the same ones. We all come into this text with our own interests, specialties, experience, and strengths. One of the joys of teaching is the chance to add your own kind of depth to a course.

This is a fair cookbook. By that, I mean that you can follow the instructions and get a reliable set of results from it. Or, if you read this a little more broadly, it invites all the embellisments and complements that an active researcher or practitioner is sure to think of.

//wiredweird

With all the advances in computers, including the availability of industry specific software, industry still has huge demands for systems that facilitate the operation of their company. This book is oriented to teach those who design such systems. This book is intended to be a text for undergraduate college students. It is recommended that the student have at least a computer literacy class as a prerequisite. I believe that I would also require at least one programming cource to give the student some idea of what he will be asking the coders and programmers to do.

Overall I rate the book as excellent for its intended purpose of enabling the understanding of what a system has to do to please everyone from the person putting in the raw data to management getting the reports they need out of the system.

The one complaint I have is that the book is very Microsoft oriented. For instance, in the section on database design, the book talks about making a desktop prototype of the main database using MSDE. Oracle and SAP are barely mentioned, and Linux isn't even in the index. In the real world the student needs to understand that Microsoft doesn't own everything.

I was forced to purchase this book as part of masters program class. Lets start off by stating that the price of this book is ludicrous and universities that force students to purchase this book are nuts! Why, because there are far better books on the subjects that this book tried to cover and they do a much better job and are far more up to date. A masters program is suppose to help you master a subject and give students information that they can use in the real world -- the book falls short and there many other better books on the subject. The short version is this book tried to do to much and the authors put their own twists on the subject and failed on both accounts.

Lets begin with the fact that this book has way too many errors for what they are charging for the book. Diagrams that are clearly wrong, page references that point to the wtong pages, and writting style and fonts that are difficult to read. I am unsure if this book was actually edited for its content. It is more of a Ph.d research paper than a book that someone can actually use.

The book suffers from two things:

1) The authors use terms that are not standard industry terms often times in the book and sound like they are more trying to create their own new software development methodology than to teach concepts (BTW: The world does not need the FAST method they push). To make matters worse the table of context stinks and often important terms are not listed. My professor then created his own lecture slides that used the proper terms but our only reference was this stupid book. If my exams did not count on this book, I would have pulled one of many other books off my bookshelf instead of using this book. I cannot describe how P.O.'d I am at this book! When many asked the professor about the book all he could do was apologize and offer better references. So why did we use this book?

2) They are trying to do way too much in a single book and fail most of the time. Without lecuture notes to support many concepts, much is lost. The book is a hodgepodge of good intentions without ever getting anything correct.

Ok, what is good about this book.....the workflow diagrams of what it takes to do something like a Buy vs Build decision as well as other steps. Those diagrams are very good but are not enough to justify the book. There a few random paragraphs where you read them and say "the have a clue" but at the same time wonder where this came from out of blue and almost without context with the rest of the section. It seemed like they tried to update parts of the book, but it is a rush job and inconsistent. Maybe, just like software, sometimes its time to throw it away, keep the good parts and start again.

If there are instructors out there who are looking at this, do your students a favor....look at the books in the Addison-Wesley Professional Title Series and have your students purchase several books that cover the topics better and for which they would actually want to keep the books once the class is completed and could use in their daily professional lives.

I am upset I was forced to purchase this book and I am upset that I will not get a 100% refund on my money once I am done.

The best part of completing my class is that I will not have to use this book and will be able to sell it.

The comments on here that are extolling the virtues of this book must be from people who have very little industry experience because this book fails at so many levels. I normally do not comment on here on a regular basis but this book has me so worked up I had to comment to stop future pain and madness for other students!

This book is clearly written for those who are seeking to be System Analysts. A significant chunk of pages are dedicated to their specific role.

The book covers everything from Database Design, Project Management, Process Management, Object Oriented Programming, UML Diagrams, and System Design. Obviously, no textbook can cover all the topics in depth.

Overall, the textbook is very well written and easy to read. The summaries at the end of chapters were very well done. The questions were quite thought provoking.

If you are a System Analyst or would like to be one, this book is highly informative. If not, then you will still get a good overview Information Technology.

This is my second Master's Degree. I am software professional for over 16 years. Still I feel this book (by Jeffrey Whitten and Lonnie ) is extreme difficult to read. I had to buy because my University Course.

I can suggest you another book that I have:-
Systems Analysis and Design (Ahelly Cashman Series)
ISBN-10: 0324597665
ISBN-13: 978-0324597660
This is a "Golden Book" in the line of Systems Analysis. Probably best of the best book ever written. I guarantee you "Ahelly Cashman Series" will never disappoint you. This book more on SSAD (which I am doing for 16 years) and I wanted to know more on O-O. Please note "Ahelly Cashman Series" does discuss with O-O and Agile method too. You will be surprised how subject like SAD can be interesting. It surprised me.

Back to my feedback, as I said, "Systems Analysis and Design Methods by Jeffrey Whitten and Lonnie Bentley" was not my choice but school selected it!

My opinion on this book "(by Jeffrey Whitten and Lonnie Bentley)", it is extreme difficult to read. Reading style in non-interesting. Topic to topic change is without any link.

Any writer may know a lot and be a scholar but the presentation style is very important. Writing should be based on the reader's acceptance perspective. Otherwise, it is waste of words and papers...!! If the readers/students cannot accept the writing style, better change the style and make it interesting.
This book was not helpful for me.

Better buy this "Systems Analysis and Design (Ahelly Cashman Series)", as I mentioned.

Many other classmates and myself got the almost identical International Student 7th Edition w/ Paperback Cover for almost half the price as the hardcover U.S. edition of the book. I got an A in this class, so you can trust my judgment! The pages are a little off in some chapters but it's mostly due to different formatting. The table of contents for the international version is exactly the same aside from page numbers for both editions. I didn't notice any content missing and was able to follow along without any problems in class as the teacher would tell us which page to go to for the US version and the International version. I didn't have any problems completing any of the end of chapter exercises for the class homework as all the questions were exactly the same as the US version. There is really no reason for you to buy the US version of this book when you can get the International version for so much less!

I had to take Systems Analysis as part of my masters degree and usually, anything you must take becomes less interesting BUT, this book does a good job of clearly explaining the process of systems analysis.
From identifying entities in a process flow diagram with visual aides to the accompanying CD-ROM with slide show presentations of the content, I think this book provides a painless way to learn the material.
It's concisely written but a little verbose at times.
The author makes heavy use of graphics and sample diagrams so you can see how industry professionals do it.

This book provides a wonderful scope of systems analysis and design methods, and a bunch of related topics. After reading this book, you should feel comfortable going to any organization and providing them with a model/graphic of their business processes.

I had to take Systems Analysis as part of my masters degree and usually, anything you _must_ take becomes less interesting BUT, this book does a good job of clearly explaining the process of systems analysis.

From identifying entities in a process flow diagram with visual aides to the accompanying CDROM with slide show presentations of the content, I think this book provides a painless way to learn the material.

It's concisely written but a little verbose at times.
The author makes heavy use of graphics and sample diagrams so you can see how industry professionals do it.

Found the book very complete, although a bit general. The charts and graphics were well designed and developed. Purchased the international version ($39 delivered), not a good idea; ended up purchasing the regular book and paying $80 plus from a discount suppler. The colors and readability of the international version were inferior in quality. I found the book ideal for an introductory course in Systems Analysis and Design, with support for object oriented analysis.

The authors have an excellent website with excellent study cases to follow. The book follows a good logical sequence and every chapter builds on the previous one creating a good flow with just enough repetition to aid in retention. The exercises were good with great variety. The summary at the end of each chapter was complete and helpful.