Systems Analysis & Design

Last update: February 21, 2024 - Added Generative AI statement

Systems Analysts Needed Now! What will you recommend when presented with a complex enterprise scenario? Use either traditional (structured) design tools or agile/object-oriented tools to prepare a model of your innovative solution.

Teams will be given a business problem statement and approximately a three hour time frame to analyze and design. Any widely used methodology may be used such as Object Oriented Analysis, Structured Analysis, Information Engineering, Prototyping, etc.

Team Composition

Teams may be made up of 1-2 people.

Schedule

Thursday, April 4, 2024 7:00 - 11:00 PM

Skills and Resources

The problem statement will allow multiple analysis and design methodologies, which may include:

  • Structured analysis
  • Object-oriented analysis
  • Information engineering
  • Rapid application design and prototyping
  • Any other widely accepted methodology

Teams are expected to utilize ONE and ONLY ONE Analysis and Design approach. Using a combination of components from both the Structured/Information Engineering approach and the Object Oriented approach should be avoided. The business model does not have to be fully implemented; however, a system design that allows user prototyping with screen/window/web page interaction will be considered in the over-all grading. This contest is software and methodology independent.

Teams must provide own business modeling software. This could include any CASE, I-CASE or other model-based development product. Example tools may include: Oracle Designer/Developer, Unified Modeling Language, Visible Analyst, CA Cool Gen, Cool Jex, etc. Solutions should be submitted as Microsoft Word or PDF files.

Protocol

Teams will be given the problem statement at the beginning of the contest time.  Time will be allowed to read the problem statement and ask any questions in a common session.  Once the question & answer time has closed, no further questions will be answered.  Each team will submit their solution for judging prior to the contest closing time, at which point no further submissions will be accepted.

Statement Regarding use of Generative AI

We—the USITCC Conference Committee and the Foundation for Information Technology Education (FITE)—recognize the impressive growth, application, and overall utility of AI in shortening the time to completion of projects both professionally and academically. The use of Generative has increased dramatically in recent years. Students, employees, and organizations are leveraging tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, Midjourney, and DeepMind to supplement their own skillsets and produce greater volumes of work.

With that said, we and our cooperative organizations jointly decided to prohibit/ban the use of Generative AI from the 2024 USITCC competition.

The competitions at USITCC are primarily focused on and tailored to the knowledge bases and skillsets of undergraduate students from 2 & 4-year schools. The purpose of these competitions is to gauge, test, and present appropriate challenges for this level of student understanding and the competitions also allow students to detect their own deficiencies and strengths. Students will need to possess a solid understanding of the fields they are competing in on their own merits to truly discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie, such that they may better develop themselves for the professional world in which they are seeking careers.

Therefore, usage of Generative AI to assist in the answering, production, and development of student submissions is prohibited from the competition overall. Violation of this ban may result in the forfeiture of the competitor in that competition. We reserve the right to examine competition related network traffic data during this event. Certain web domain access may be blocked as well.

Previous Problem Statements

2023 USITCC Systems Analysis and Design

2022 Regional Competition Systems Analysis and Design

2019 USITCC Systems Analysis and Design

2018 USITCC Systems Analysis and Design

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