Essay on the Mobile Application for Small-scale Business

Project scope and description

Mobile application for small-scale business is a management automation system which is composed of the following parts.

Management of the stock

Business transactions via handheld computers

Order management

Accounting system

Customer management

Reporting services

Management of the stock is the management in which items in a small business are monitored, organized and coordinated so that they are readily available to the customer whenever needed. Modules availed by this software system in the management of the stock include tracking of outgoing and incoming goods. The function will be responsible for preventing the business from running out of stock. Typing keyword of the good and then pressing search, the user of the system will be able to know if the stock has fallen under a predefined level.

With the help of the aid of the mobile application, the users can easily order goods from wholesalers or directly from the manufacturers. This cheaper and increases service efficiency which are the main qualifications of the software system. The features make the application practical and powerful for all the users of the system.

The system will have a simple user interface to enable the user to select the appropriate options and data insertion according to the required order on the screen of the mobile device. The interface is embedded into the mobile device by installing the application into the mobile device.

The order management function provides solutions to the users needs. By using a mobile device, users will have access to the utilities provided by the small businesses. To use the application, the user will need to register first.

Software process model and team organization

To complete the project within three months, we had to do the following; analysis, design, implementation, and testing of the software system. The system was developed using an incremental model. The model combines linear sequential model elements with the philosophy of prototyping. As done in the incremental model, the prototypes will be produced in the same periods. Each prototype will have a certain part of the entire project. Low-level prototype, high-level prototype, and the whole project will be produced respectively in stages during the semester.

Detailed system description

Mobile application for small-scale business is a management automation system which contains the following modules; stock management, order management, accounting system, customer management, and reporting services. It was designed using PhoneGap and framework 7. PhoneGap is a cross-platform mobile development framework distributed by Apache Cordova. The system has two user levels, the administrators, and other system users.

Administrator

An administrator is a super-user of the software system. They are users who have the most crucial rights and responsibilities for the system. The administrator initializes the system when it is set up to the users mobile device. Items defined by the manager include:

The administrator gives the users information such as; user id, user name, employee address, phone number.

The administrator deletes user from the system

The administrator creates the inventory list for each item, cost, and which firm it has been taken from.

The administrator lists all the goods and their cost-profit information.

The administrator is the only user who has the privileges to delete or update any information they recorded when needed. For example, updates and deletion of users can only be done by the administrator. If the user no longer works for the business, then their account is closed by the administrator. Changes about the personal information of the user such as address and mobile number are updated by the administrator.

Another privilege of the administrator is viewing reports to have the statistical information and results about the operations of the business. Report contents can be related to accounting for example profit calculation report, remaining stock calculation report among others.

Finally, the administrator can update their personal information or user information. Personal information includes the user id, user name, address, mobile phone and accessibility level.

On launching the application, the login screen appears. The user can enter their login details to access the various privileges; this has been achieved by assigning users different access levels in the database.

System administrators are taken to the screen below. They can press add a user or delete a user button to carry the desired operation.

The super user populates the form with the new user details and the presses the submit button to save the details to the database.

Pressing delete user button, a prompt box appear requesting to enter the email of the user to be deleted. Pressing ok deletes the user from the database.

User

A user participates in the system by providing registration details. Being a member requires the user to get a user name and password to login into the software system. As a member, a user has lots of options to perform on the mobile application system. The first option ordering of goods. After logging on their accounts, the user can display the list of the available goods existing in their business by entering goods keyword and pressing the search button.

Users of the system will as well record incoming and outgoing money during the day. Incoming money is expressed as the payment of the customer for the goods purchased. Outgoing money is the money given out from the businesss cashbox. They record the payment according to the names of the companies which are uniquely defined.

Upon login, the user is presented with the above screen. A search field with its button where the user can type in the name of the stock and press the button to get the stock availability details. Users are also presented with two buttons to enter the new stock and to carry out sales operation.

The user populates the above form with the appropriate details and then presses the submit button to save the stock into the database.

On pressing the sales button, the above screen appears. The user fills in the form with appropriate details. Pressing calculate button calculates the profit by subtracting the purchasing price from the sales price and then multiplying the results by the quantity sold.

Pressing the remaining stock button brings the user to this screen. It shows a dropdown of the available stock. Submit button saves the sales details into the sales table.

System requirements

Functionality

Users

To use the functionality of the system, the user must first register to the system to have user name and password set to their account.

Users orders for goods

The user can update the password and their user name

Users take the payment of goods.

They record all of the inventory related payments as outcome

Users can know which stock needs to be restored by observing the remaining stock from the drop down.

Administrator

The administrator adds all the business related information. This is listed as follows;

Defines users and register them into the system.

Creates an inventory list with additional information related to them

Creates the product list with related information such as profit and cost

Creates a list of the manufacturers who produce the goods to be sold

Administrators updates any information in the previously defined list.

They delete any of the items from any of the list they created.

They have a privilege of viewing all kinds of reports about the order, the stock, and accounting information.

The administrators close the user account when necessary.

Administrators can change personal information such as password and user name.

Estimation

COCOMO was used to get an accurate insight to project effort, cost, and size. COCOMO is an estimation technique based on lines of code which are estimated using function points using the historical baseline of information. That is the average proportion of lines of code to function points (LOC / FP). Therefore, by finding the function point, it will enable us to estimate the effort and the cost of the software product. Some inputs and number of outputs counts the distinct number of items that the user provides to the system, and the system presents to the user.

Constraints

Time constraints

We only have about four months to complete the development, bud fixing and documentation of the mobile application software. There are a lot of ideas, but they cannot be implemented fully within the given time. Also, the context of business automation is quite huge. There are many features that are possible to be included in the system, but we will just deliver a few most useful to the system with an attractive interface.

Funding constraints

To develop and implement a mobile application, we will need funding to buy at least one mobile device. The department is expected to meet this need.

Database requirement

The general requirement for the database system of the mobile application include;

The database is by the administrator according to the businesss specification and data.

Database cleaning up is controlled by periodic deletion and manual deletion.

Data stored in the database includes;

User data

User name, password, mobile number, address, user id, date,

Product data

Product id, product name, manufactured date, ingredients.

Manufacturer data

Manufacturer name, manufacturer id, mobile number, address.

Data requirements

Accessibility

Accessibility specifies the requirements associated with the degree to which the system must be accessible to authorized people.

The graphical user interface information about the remaining stock, profit among others.

The graphical user interface will be used to update and view user information. Only users who have user id will be able to use it.

Correctness

Correctness defines the requirements associated with the degree to which the system can contain defects and still be acceptable to the client.

Accuracy

Accuracy specifies the following requirement concerning the degree of the system output correctness.

The value of money shall be correct to nearest two decimal places.

Time value shall be correct to the nearest second.

Precision

Precision specifies the following requirements concerning the resolution of the system numerical outputs

The value of money shall be correct to nearest two decimal places.

Time value shall be correct to the nearest second.

Timeliness

Timeliness specifies requirements concerning the degree to which the system must ensure that its persistent information is up to date.

When users update data, the system ensures that the data will be available in the next login.

The system shall delete permanently obsolete information from the storage.

Maintainability

Maintainability specifies the requirement associated with the ease with which the system can be maintained.

The system shall permit the swapping and upgrade of hardware without down-time

The system shall permit the upgrade of software without down-time

The mean time to fix shall not exceed three days

Reliability

The reliability of the delivered software is very important for this project. Defects may cause a great amount of time and money loss. Software quality assurance should be taken into account to prevent possible defects. File back will be implemented to act as a back-up hence preventing information loss. Reliability specifies requirements associated with the reliability of the system such as the mean time between failures (MTBF), the summation of mean time to failure and means time to repair shall exceed one month.