What I have learnt from System Life Cycle and How it influence my progress in my IA

This week I learnt about system life cycle, which talks about how we design the entire process of making a computer program. This cycle helps me to make everything organized. Especially when I talk to Mr. Pete about my thoughts in my program, he mentioned that I need to have a proper planning before I really design it. And in this way I had my IA progressed statically without having too much confusion about what I should program and how I would program.

The following text would be my planning of my IA, which is also my current progress with my IA.

Criteria A: Planning

 

I.              Define the Problem (Word Count: 92)

In astrophysics, there usually are many data for scientists to observe the brightness and luminosity of a particular star, the distance between galaxies, and the formation of the universe. However, the finding of all such relationships requires the processing of data, which has been a tough problem, especially drawing of the line of best fit. Line of best fit is referring to the line or curve that can describe the similar trend as the data point goes on the graph.  Mostly in our daily life, people use Excel’s basic functionality to solve this issue by attempting all functions Excel provide in depicting all those data; nevertheless, in astrophysics if people adjust the best fit line manually, it could take ages and may still not having a satisfying result because of the base of the problem is a large amount of data. Thus, my client, my physics teacher asked me to help him design a special program to draw the line of best fit for him. And with the graph this program provided he could teach students with more information about the galaxies.

 

II.           Rationale for Solution (Word Count: 167)

In this project, Java, Microsoft Access, Excel would be used in order to create an interface for the client to upload data and operate some required Access and Excel functions easily. This project would be able to read the data and find the best fit line for the users and produce several graphs as the study for the subject of astrophysics required. The graphs would include histogram, line chart, and the graph of the function. In producing the line of best fit, least square method and linear regression are applied. Least square method is the method that finds the best fit function for a group of data by minimizing the variance of their errors. Linear regression is the application of regression to determine the relationship between or among two or more different variables.

 

The reason of why I choose the above three programming environment and language:

Ÿ  Java:

Ÿ  A mature programming environment

Ÿ  Contains many basic needs of operation that can link with Access and Excel

Ÿ  Has its own interfaces to connect with internet

Ÿ  Used to produce user interface and read in data

Ÿ  Access:

Ÿ  To store the data

Ÿ  Belong to the Microsoft Office

Ÿ  Provide functions of inquiry, add, delete and modify

Ÿ  Excel:

Ÿ  Belong to the Microsoft Office

Ÿ  Can import data into Access

Ÿ  Used to draw graph

 

III.         Success Criteria (Word Count: 88)

1.      The user interface provide users to drag in their data which should be in the form of“.doc”

2.      The program would let the users to select the range of data that need to be processed

3.      The line of best fit function could show the variance of this line of best fit

4.      The line of best fit could be drawn by the Excel

5.      The difference between the data point and the point on the curve could be identified

6.      The program could hold data of any size