Database Systems Development Project:
Enterprise Identity Management

Introduction

Database project should be managed just as any software engineering project. A database project must go through a full development cycle in order to ensure the quality of the project output. In this semester long project, students have to follow the following simple (and waterfall like) development cycle:

Part I

• Requirement Analysis

Part II

• Conceptual Design
• Physical DB Design

Part III

• Application Design

Part IV

• DB Implementation
• Application Implementation
• Testing with Test Case development

There are four parts of the project and each part is considered as a deliverable with these weighting:

Part I: Requirement Analysis: 5%

Part II: DB Design: 5%

Part II: DB Application Design: 5%

Part IV: Implementation: 15% with additional 10% extra credit possibility.

Objective

The objective of this project is to develop a database system application. It covers various aspects of object-oriented analysis, database conceptual and physical design, and database application design. It also provides an opportunity for a hands-on experience with client-server database programming using Java, JDBC, C++/C, ODBC, and GUI programming. Mastering the materials in class as well as the ability to learn new things quickly will be essential for success in this project.

Students are required to form a group of 4 or 5. As a research oriented project, only a brief set of requirements are given. There is a lot of room for individual group to come up with new ideas and implementation methods. Each group is responsible for:

• Perform detail requirement analysis to come up with a set of functions to implement in the project
• Perform conceptual database design (ER) according to the output of the requirement analysis
• Perform physical database design using DB2 (or other database)
• Implementation and Testing of the final product
• (There are more than enough opportunities for creativity!)

Skills Required (or Need to learn)

• Knowlege of Database Design and Implementation
• Knowledge of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
• Understanding of Client/Server programming
• Basic of design patterns
• Programming skills in Java, C++, C, JDBC, ODBC.

Description

Overview

Security has been a major issue in an organization nowadays. You, as a group of system programmer team, have comes up with the concept of Identity Management using Centralized Enterprise Management Layer (CEML). The CEML would be used as a single digital layer to manage every single "employee" in your organization. Once an "employee" is created into CEML, you could control which domain he/she belongs to and according to the domain, assign Internal IT Resources and Internet Resources to the "employee".

In order to use any IT resource, an "employee" must be associated with the corresponding Internal IT Resources. And the same goes for Internet Resources.

Basic Architecture

In this project, you have to develop a database system called Centralized Enterprise Management Layer (CEML). CEML is an advanced system for Identity Management of users in today's network computing environment. The CEML systems contains the following components:

Employee Record Store: This is the central employee data schema that store information about an employee in an organization. It contains information such

IT Internal Resources: This is a list of IT resources (table?). Each IT resource could be mapped to an "employee". If a mapping exists, the employee would have all (and only) the access right specified in the IT resource.

Internet Resources: This is a list of Internet Resources (table?). Each Internet Resource could be mapped to an "employee". If a mapping exists, the employee would have all (and only) the access right specified in the Internet Resource.

Domain: A group of employee with common attributes could be grouped within a domain. For example, all sales team employee could be group in the sales domain. Or, all UNIX users could be grouped into a domain. The CEML has to provide an interface for administrator to administrate domain.

Sub-domain: Sub-domain is a "subclass" of domain.

Common-domain: Common-domain is a sub-domain that shared by multiple domains.

Assumption

• CEML must support concurrent user usage.

• At the minimum, you have to support at least three IT Internal Resources and three Internet Resources.
• If you make any assumption, write them all down in the requirement analysis document.

Other Implementation Requirement

• CEML must be implemented as an Application Programming Interface (API). For example, JDBC is an API, ODBC is an API, OpenGL is a library of API, iostream is a library API.
• We must write a demo program to show all the features in CEML. Your demo program probably allows user to interactively add a user, delete a user, put a user in a domain, sub domain, add IT resource or Interface resource to a user, etc.
• The demo program must be a separate program from the CEML system.
• More detail would be given in class.

Design and Analysis Consideration

The group has to decide on various design and analysis issues, for example:

• What exactly the Employee Record Store contains
• The Database Design of Employee Record Store
• The Database Design of Internal IT Resources
• The Database Design of Internet Resources
• The Database Design of the multi-domain, sub-domain and common domain concepts in CEML
• What IT resources to support (Create of Windows accounts? Use of Windows resources? Use of UNIX file permission?, etc.)
• What Internet resources to support (urls? ftp site? https resources?)
• The specification of CEML API interface (Java Interface? C++ like library?)
• What technology to use for CEML? Java Servlet, Native Java Program, Web Interface, Windows Interface, etc.
• What program to build for demo all the features for CEML
• etc.

Schedule

This system is supposed to be developed according to the software lifecycle using OOAD and database principles taught in class. Good software engineering principles must be followed. In particular, documentation must be good.

1. Requirement and specification. (In English or UML)
2. Database Design (ER and DDL)
3. Application Design (Class Diagram, etc)
4. Implementation Coding and Test Plan

Grading

As the whole class will be working on similar projects, relative grading will be used. In other words, all the projects will be ranked within the class and points will be assigned accordingly. A lower point bound will also be used to ensure that some of the core features are implemented in the project. (For example, 200 points for base features, 100 points for extra features)

Final Word of Warning

This is not an "easy" class and the project is an essential part of the overall grade. People who did not deliver the project well enough could really hurt their grade as the project contains more than 40% of the overall grade.

Avoid:

• Forming group late
• Changing group in the middle of the semester
• Start late and rush any part of the project
• Form a group of less than 4/5 people
• Not enough extra features if the group is more than 5 people
• Did the final integration of the project late
• Do not do enough testing
• All but actually one person in the group does all the programming (No, people do not get lucky and teammate will complain...)

On the bright side, most of the students in the A range did really well in the project. So, there is no upper bound for an A. (In other words, I do not limit the number of A in a class.)

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