BA 370 - Database Group Project

• Preamble

• Please note that this project represents the first phase of a two-phase project. This first phase (database design and development) is covered in BA 370; we cover phase two (application design and development) in BA 371.
  

• Database Project:

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Information System: Sponsored by Hitachi Consulting (Keep an eye on Hitachi's campus recruiting at OSU).

• In this project you'll design and prototype parts of an information system for managing CSR data.  In the BA370 part of this project you'll design and generate (parts of) the application's supporting database. In the BA371 part of this project you'll conduct a careful requirement analysis and design and prototype parts of the application that programmatically interact with the database.
• Some business logic and definitions:
• Increasingly, companies must keep track of the social responsibility record of themselves, their partner companies, their suppliers and their customers. 
•  (private) social responsibility audits provide information on the social responsibility scores of these companies.
  
• The results of audits must be available and searchable.
  
• Violation mitigation measures and procedures must be documented and made available and searchable.
  
• When companies change their names, are taken over by other companies or otherwise change their identity, their associated social responsibility record must be retained with them.

• As working on this project implies the acquisition of sensitive and/or classified product and company information, you will be asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) developed by the Hitachi and OSU legal teams. We strongly recommend that you work on this project and hence, sign the agreement. However, in the event that you have principal objections against signing this agreement, you may choose the alternative class project described below.
  

• Course Learning Outcomes (CLO) System; Sponsored by College of Business - Oregon State University.
• In this project you'll prototype parts of an information system for tracking College of Business Core and Course Learning Outcomes. In the BA370 part of this project you'll design and generate the application's supporting database. In the BA371 part of this project you'll conduct a careful requirement analysis and design and prototype parts of the application that programmatically interact with the database.
• Some business logic:
  
• Instructors of COB courses must define learning outcomes for each and every of their courses. Learning outcomes are concrete, measurable learning results.
• The 'sum' of all learning outcomes associated with all courses a student takes constitutes an overall learning product or profile.
• Learning outcomes change if courses evolve.
• All changes over a period constitute a learning outcome 'history.'
• Hence, a complete historic record must be kept.
• The learning outcomes of a prereq course must be validated as 'necessary' and 'met' by the instructors of the incoming course.

• Lack of 'necessary' prereq outcomes signals an invalid prereq.

• General Requirements:

• Groups of three (3) people design and develop a database schema to support the above information needs. This includes:
•  An Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) containing:
• All tables.
• For each table:
• All columns.
• For each column:
  

• Column name.
• Column data type.
• Column nullability.

• Primary key.
• Foreign key constraints.

• Optionality/cardinality relationships.

• An electronic version of an SQL script containing the SQL for generating and dropping the schema in Microsoft Access.

• Each group will prepare a written, text-processed report containing its database design and will submit this report together with the database and database generation scripts to the instructor by Friday Dec. 3, 2005.

• Report Guidelines: 

• A sample outline:
• Title Page:
• Project Title
• Name Authors
• Course and Instructor
• Date

• Abstract (a very brief, no more than 1/3 page summary of the report)
• Introduction (summary of the case study).
• Various sections presenting the results of your design work.
• Conclusion
• References (if applicable)

  Use the following format:

  Smith, T.J. (2001) An Overview of Systems Design; Hammersmith Publ., Ottawa, Ontario.

  Smith, T.J. (2001) System Design Methods; Journal of System Design, 12, 551-561.

  Smith, T.J. (2001) Systems Design; New Developments; Available: http://www.wherever.com/smith/hereitis.pdf.

• Format requirements:
• Use headings and separate your text in logical blocks and segments.
• Number pages (Title page has no number. First page with content has page number 1).
• Integrate figures and tables into the text; do not add them as an appendix in the back of the report.
• Caption figures and tables (use Microsoft Word support for this).
• Spell check (both automatically and manually!).
• Grammar check!
• Peer review!!

!!! Please hold on to all the materials; we'll use them again in BA 371 !!!