Product Perspective

System specification provides comprehensive requirements for the Sailboat Reservation System for Yacht Australia (YA). This document will offer great ad deeper understanding of the expectation of the YA Sailboat Reservation System to be deployed. Complete and clear knowledge of the system expectation will facilitate development of correct YA Sailboat Reservation System for the end user and can be used as a referral document during the later stages of the development process. System specification document provides the project foundation, which act as the basis to design, develop, and test the system (Kuklin, Zemskov and Nikulina, 2011 p.277). The system requirement specification (SRS) will be used by the development team to fully understand the system expectations so as to develop appropriate YA Sailboat Reservation System. SRS will be used by the end users as referral during testing stage to determine if the correct system has been developed to their expectations. If the system does not meet YA management expectations (end user), the development team will review the SRS and modify the system accordingly.

The information to be developed is a reservation system that will automate operation of the YA. The YA Sailboat Reservation System will have several sub systems in it. First is the booking and reservation system to manage and keep track of sailboat reservations. The second sub system is the payment module which gives the customers several options to choose from. The third sub system is the management module which facilitates employee, company assets, and other managerial tasks such as report generation (GAO and LUO, 2011 p.2503). This module allows the system administrator to add company assets, employees, and carry out other tasks such as confirming reservations, checking if the requested boat is available, and generating reports.

The system is made up of two end users the management (Administrator) and the customers. Bothe users should be able to access the booking and reservation module and check the status of the reservation. The management module is restricted to administrators only. One of the objective of the YA Sailboat Reservation System is to meet the increased and complex company needs. Managing the needs of YA will become more unwieldly without automation. The system should be easy to use, user appropriate, detect invalid input and prompt on what should be done, and ultimately have high level of user satisfaction.

The system requirement specification is made up of two parts; general description and specific requirements (Viswam and Karattil, 2013 p.16). The general description will give the overall high-level perspective of the YA Sailboat Reservation System while specific and in-depth requirement details is described by the specific requirements part.

System Requirement Specification

This section identifies the overall aspects that affect the system and its requirements (Benabbou, Bahloul and Dhaussy, 2016 p.893). However, specific details are not stated in this section, instead it gives a background of the requirements so as to make it understandable. Some of the aspect include:

Product Perspective: The YA Sailboat Reservation System is self-contained, independent, and scalable. The front-end part which is the user interface will be accessed over the internet via a browser. The backend (database) is accessed remotely via remote desktop connection. Oracle 8i will be used to configure all the databases of YA Sailboat Reservation System (Chen and Chen, 2011 p.778). The databases include customer information, employee details, boat information, and company financial records. The information can only be modified by authorized users. The customer information will include customer first name, last name, address, phone number, reserved sailboat, name of sailboat, credit card number, number of occupants, confirmation number, automatic cancellation, check-in time and date, checkout time and date, amount paid, and balance.  The employee information will include employee_ID, employee_name, designation, job_category (part time, permanent), and sailboat_assigned. The sailboat information will include sailboat name, status, location, and sail_rates (Xie, 2013 p.296).

• Should allow customers to register
• Has default sailboat categories and rates.
• Should have description of the sailboats
• When a sailboat is booked the sailboat, status should change to booked.
• Allow the administrator to change reservation details.
• Allow the customer to browse for other available sailboats if their choice is booked.
• When customer checkouts, the system should display amount owed.
• Allow customer to see reservation status.

• Allow customers to choose the payment method
• Allows administrator to generated receipts and invoices

• Allow company assets to be added
• Allow reports to be generated to audit YA bookings, future bookings, and sailboat revenues.
• Allows modification, deletion, addition of information on sailboat, rates, and user profiles.
• Creation of users and generation of passwords.

This part provides all the system requirements in details, that when combined with use case, ERD, context diagram, and use case description gives enough information for the developers to design, develop, and test the system to meet those requirements (WANG and LONG, 2018 p.72).

YA Sailboat Reservation System will utilize the standard I/O devices like the mouse, keyboard, printer, and monitor to interact with the system.

The various screens that the user will interact with are described in the table below (Cannon, 2008 p.238).

Name of the screen	Description
Register	Allows the users to register by keying in the details required by the system.
Sign in	Sign in to the system as a customer, administrator
Booking and Reservation	Includes save/ update, retrieve button, cancel reservation, adjust booking rates, change reservation, accept payment method.
Check-in	Check-in customer, modify sailboat stay, adjust reservation rates, special requests, accept payment method.
Checkout	Generate bill, check-out customer
Sailboat Payment	Accept payment for food and boat
Sailboat Service	New order, cancel, view, modify order, generate bill.
Customer Profile	Update, add customer details.
Administer Sailboats	Rates and availability
Administer User	Add, delete, and modify users, change password.
Reports	View, select, generate, and print reports.

The information system is categorized into three major sectors, booking/reservation, Payment, and management (Jogada and Warad, 2016 p.141).

1. Booking/Reservation

The system shall:

• Record customer details
• Record reservations
• Record Sailboat category, type, and status
• Record number of occupants
• Display sailboat rate
• Display whether the boat is guaranteed or not
• Generate reservation confirmation number which is unique.
• Automatically cancel unconfirmed reservation.
• Record expected check-in and checkout time and date.
• Check-in and checkout customers
• Allow modification of reservation details without altering or reentering customer details

1. Payment

The system shall:

• Record payment method
• Record total amount owed to customer
• Record amount paid
• Record balance
• Display invoice

1. Management

The system shall:

• Display sailboat occupancy for a period specified
• Display boat revenue for a period specified
• Display exception report
• Allow addition, modification, and deletion of information concerning customers, employees, and sailboats

The acquisition strategy is an integrated, detailed plan established as part of acquisition planning operations (Sabato, 2010 p.63). It defines the firm, support and technical strategies to meet objectives of the program and manage program risks. The strategy act as a guide to the acquisition program implementation across the whole system or program life cycle. It describes the connection phases of acquisition and work efforts, and major program events such as reviews, test activities, decision points, contracts awards, delivery quantities or production lot, and functional deployment goals. The strategy expands over time and should constantly mirror the desired goal and current status.

Acquisition Strategy

Implementing and developing an efficient acquisition strategy needs systems thinking to make sure that the different strategy elements are connected and that interrelationships are accounted for and understood during strategy execution (Hiremath, 2008 p.34). Besides, schedule, cost and capability (the performance of the system) agreement is needed, and managers of the program will require the intuitiveness to make sound decisions based on recognizing the possible risks that may cause hindrances while achieving desired results. As such, systems engineering performs a major role in executing and planning the acquisition strategy.

How Yacht Australia acquire services and products they need to implement their mission or carry out their functions differs depending on the urgency or criticality of the service or product to the company’s mission. Another factor that Yacht Australia should consider is whether acquisition involve the assignment of large amounts of the resources of the company. Acquisition planning for key, complex efforts needs formality and comprehensiveness and has an earlier, greater need for system engineering. Acquisition management at such a level regularly needs balancing the investments of several shareholders by executing and establishing a process of governance that influence a balance between the desire for a general agreement and the agility required to make tradeoffs among schedule, cost and system performance delivered to handle priorities and changing need. Because of the basic difficulties in such an environment of acquisition (operational or organizational, technical, political and economic), Yacht Australia needs program directors to document and develop an acquisition strategy to clearly state the technical and business concepts of management for achieving the objectives of the program within set constraints of resource.  System engineers of Yacht Australia are normally called to assist in executing and developing the acquisition strategy.

Concentrate on total strategy: Yacht Australia should avoid concentrating on the aspects of contract of an acquisition strategy. In most organizations, the acquisition strategy term means the aspects of contract on an acquisition effort. Such a view appears to assume other factors such as cost, technical and schedule that may affect a successful result and normally have interrelationships that must be put into consideration to identify how to obtain required capabilities. The overall strategy will be influenced and shaped by several factors that must be put into consideration collectively and individually in executing and planning the acquisition effort.

Document it: Yacht Australia needs program managers to establish an acquisition strategy adjusted to the specifics of their program. Besides, it describes acquisition strategy as the overall plan of the program manager for satisfying the need of the mission I the most economical, efficient and timely manner. An acquisition strategy is unwarranted or unnecessary for an acquisition effort. For key acquisition programs of a system, a documented or written acquisition strategy may be utilized to satisfy Yacht Australia needs for acquisition plan.

Concentrate on Total Strategy

Employ early systems engineering: essentially, the Yacht Australia needs to have formality and greater detail in the process of planning for acquisitions that are more costly and complex (Lin, Ho and Lin, 2015 p.64). Besides, these large-scale and major acquisition efforts have a larger need for the employment of appropriate system engineering practices and principles, both among the suppliers and within the government of the services and products. A familiar principle of project management or program is that many programs are unsuccessful at the start. Such a perception can be associated to insufficient system engineering, which when conducted efficiently clearly states what the government requires, translate those requirements into solicitation or procurement needs, and determines, risks, issues and opportunities that influence and shape the healthiness of the acquisition strategy.

An acquisition strategy entails several elements: an acquisition strategy is not one body but involves several element parts that joins together to create an overall approach or strategy for acquiring through contract services or supplies/products required to accomplish the needs of the company (DJEBRANI, ABDESSEMED and BENALI, 2010 p.339). These components appear to vary depending on the acquisition effort nature on whether the effort is properly controlled as a program, and on the acquisition procedures, policies and governance regulations and policies of the company being supports. Nevertheless, a common component of most acquisition strategies (program) is designing the program in terms of when and how required capabilities will be created, examined and delivered to the consumer. There exist two fundamental approaches to capability deliverance:

• Altogether, in one step (sometimes known as big bang or grand design) to accomplish unchanging, well-defined need.
• Incrementally in spirals (or series of steps) to adapt to updates and changes to requirements based on response from capability incremental delivery (Okuyama, 2017 p.127). The approach is usually called agile or evolutionary acquisitions.

Select a proper strategy: choosing which delivery approach of capability to utilize relies on various factors such as the maturity level of enabling technology, requirements stability or the emerging nature of the requirement that is being addressed by the acquisition effort, what is being acquired and the rate of change of technology. For many IT (information technology) acquisition effort, experience has demonstrated that an incremental/evolutionary/agile strategy is favorable to planning and accommodation for changes fundamental in software-intensive systems (Su, 2016 p.235). Nevertheless, including an agile or evolutionary approach into the capability delivery does not assure that an acquisition strategy is appropriate. Other factors also influence the efficiency of a particular strategy (Wang, Liang and Qian, 2013 p.102). These aspects include whether the strategy is established on a valid evaluation of the risks associated in accomplishing the acquisition effort objectives, knowledge-driven or meaningful event milestones analysis and verification strategy and realistic test to evaluate progress towards accomplishing acquisition goals, and realistic schedule, cost and delivered capability (performance) baselines.

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