Chapter 3

METHODOLOGY

Research Design

The developer will make use of the common descriptive and developmental method of research. Descriptive by denotation is a method that is used to gather factual information about certain instance. Brickman et.al (2009) states that factual information is best gathered by survey instrument such as questionnaire interview, and face to face observation. The descriptive method is used to gather the current situation of the human resource management of the company. It also uses to identify the functional and non functional requirement that the system must have and in addition the features that will be incorporated as deemed required by the stakeholder.

Developmental method on the other hand requires a tangible output rather than information concept contrary to the descriptive methodology. It is systematic study in designing and developing and evaluating instructional programs process and products that must meet the criteria of internal consistency and effectiveness (Cornel n.d). The developer has chosen to utilize these two method which is complementary to one another. Descriptive research will be utilized by the developer to unleash the required information to capture the actual condition. The development method will coincide with the software engineering development methodology relying on the information gathered using the descriptive methodology.

In this manner, the developer will make use of the Agile Scrum model which will serve as a guide in developing and designing the system. Agile methodology is a developmental tool which will help the development team to respond to changes through incremental and iterative cadences known as sprints. Scrum is lightweight development tool applicable for managing and controlling iterative and incremental project of all types.

The primal principle of the Scrum methodology is that it gives the stakeholder or the end user to work hand and hand with the development team to identify and prioritize the functionalities of the system which is transmuted in the form of product backlog. The product backlog is undertaken to ascertain that recommended feature, bug fixes in a functional requirements are considered in order to deliver a working system base on the needs of the stakeholders (Agile Methodologies for Software Development, n.d)

The software methodology is also chosen by the developer based upon agile manifesto which considers individual and interaction, working software, customer and collaboration, and responding to change.

In the like manner some studies involved in the development of human resource information system used the same methodology such as the Online Human Resource Information System for Pines College conducted by SinoCruz (2012).

Below is the figure showing the different phases of Agile Scrum development

Figure 2: Scrum Methodology

Product Backlog. This is the first phase of Scrum Methodology. These are the prioritized list of project requirements or features that provide business value for the product owner. It is an specific ordered list of the desired work on the project which are gathered from the system owners, usually a combination of story-based and task based work. This contains prioritized list of the desired feature of the product (Schwaber and Beedle, 2001).

In this phase, the developer identified all the requirements acquired from the clientele through interview and observations. Based on the gathered data through interview and observation, the developer now identifies the task to be done in order to meet the features and functional requirements of the system.

Sprints Planning. This is the second phase of Scrum Methodology. This phase consists of work units that are required to achieve the stated requirement defined in the product backlog list that must be fit into predefined time-frame (typically 30 days). It contains a list of task needed to complete the product backlog items the team has committed to complete in the sprint (Saddington, 2012).

The developer in this phase analyzed the product backlog based on the given requirements from the product owner and system users. Tasks were then identified and were given priorities in order to determine which has the highest priority in the development through a time boxed activity called as Gantt Chart. At the end of each sprint, the product developer conducts sprint retrospective meeting with the product owner together with other teams to show what has been accomplished. Typically, this takes the form of product demonstration of the new features.

Further, throughout this phase the developer identified the required time to accomplish the entire tasks that were not done yet. The remaining approximated task in the sprint were calculated on a daily basis and graphed, resulting in sprint. The developers analysis of the system is divided into five major iterations, the design intended for the system module, coding and integration of the different modules of the system along with alpha testing.

Sprint Backlog. This is the third phase of the Scrum Methodology. The sprint backlog is a list of task identified by the Scrum team to be completed during the Sprint. The list is derived by selecting product backlog items from the top of the Product Backlog until the work is enough to fill the sprint (Felix, 2009).

In this phase, the developer spends more time to understand the task, the design, the existing code, and the architectural possibility. A deeper understanding of the system development will serve as a guide for the solution. The developer in this phase will review the list of things that were considered during Sprint Planning. The developer will ascertain that the lists were implemented during the stage of development.

Daily Scrum. This refers to the short meeting held every day to coordinate the effort and overcome roadblocks during a sprint. The objective of daily scrum is to take a pulse of the progress and remove impediments as quickly as possible (Schwaber and Beedle, 2001).

In this phase the developer compares list of things to do with that of the accomplished task, should there be any discrepancy the developer will have to ascertain to catch up with what is scheduled to be accomplished.

Product Release. The final phase of the scrum is the product release, every time the sprint is accomplished; a new system feature is delivered to the product owner for testing and employment. Once the sprints were accomplished, the system on hand will be delivered to the product owner or clientele for product testing of the new feature that were added. It important to note that the demo may not contain all planned functionality, but rather those functions that can be delivered within the time-frame that was established (Millet, 2011).

In this phase the developer ends the development process and the product shall be prepared for the release which includes integration, product testing, user documentation materials, training, and marketing preparation.

Sources of Data

The primary sources of data were derived from the observation of the business process and the interviews conducted with the intended user of the system, such as the human resource, administration and employee of the organization

The secondary sources of data derived such as library research, internet, books, journal, and articlesInstrumentation and Data Collection

The developer in this study will use multiple instruments and techniques so as to achieve the stated objectives, specially the developer will employ questionnaire, and personal interviews, observation and analysis to complete the study.

Observation. The developer will use observation method in obtaining data pertinent to the study. Observation according to Dewalt (2002) is the process of enabling researchers to learn about the activities of people under study in the natural setting through observing and participating in those activities.In this method the developer will join the existing stakeholders observed the current processes of the human resource personnel. Observation will commensurate with the interview. The major focus in on the process of the human resource personnel covers recruitment, selection, payroll, and attendance monitoring.

With the developer exposed with the current process, problems and constraints were noted. The flow of data involve in doing the manual human resource process were carefully analyzed.

Interview. Another method employed by the developer in collecting data is the interview method. An interview method according to Rossman (2012) is prepared based of questions were asked to the stakeholders. In this method the developer prepared sets of questions which were distributed to the respondents. However, despite a well written questionnaire some of the respondents are not familiar with the technical jargons. To address these issues the developer will explain the questionnaire in a dialect the respondents are familiar with. Careful explanations were given an emphasis so as to avoid unsuited answer from the respondents

Analysis of Documents. The developer will employ document analysis as a tool for data collection. Document analysis is the process to collecting documents and other forms related to the operation of the business, the collected document is analyze to determine the object, the and the flow of the actual operation of the business. Documents include policies and regulations which are usually written in manuscripts, Allen (2004).

The developer collects and analyze manuscripts which are related with the human resource management. Documents includes, official business form, 201 files, and other related document thereto. This will serve as a guideline for the developer in identifying the information that is used in every phase of the business process.

Tools for data analysis

The developer will use different in unified modelling language tools to analyze the gathered data, such as use-case, data modelling, and wireframes.

Use Case Diagram. It will be used by the developer to identify the scenario of the process and the people or actors involved. The developer has indentified three major key players, the human resource, the applicant, and the employee involved in the system. Further the scenarios were observed in relation with the actors involved. The human resource performs three major tasks these include leave management, employee management, and record management. The employee on the other hand has the capability to apply and view leaves while the admin or the human resource has the capability to approve or decline leaves. Further the admin holds the capability to manage employee by adding, editing and deactivating employees. Entity Relationship Diagram. An entity-relationship (ER) diagram is a specialized graphic that illustrates the relationships between entities in a database. ER diagrams often use symbols to represent three different types of information. Boxes are commonly used to represent entities. Diamonds are normally used to represent relationships and ovals are used to represent attributes (Earp, 2011).

The heart of the Human Resources Information system of British College International is the information placed within the database. The pertinent contents of the database are best represented using the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). This graphical representation identifies the main components of the system: entities, attributes, and relationships.

The developer identified the entities that have something to do with the operations of the system. These entities contain information which describes the attribute that are unique to each entity. Each entity is uniquely identified by a key called primary key. The developer used the primary keys to relate each entity with one another the entity relationship diagram helped the developer to design the structure of the database and the relationship that shall be implemented within the tables of the database.Database Schema. It is structure described in a formal language supported by the database management system (DBMS) that refers to the organization of data to create a blue print of how a database is constructed. In a relational database, the schema defines the tables, the fields in each table, and the relationships between fields and tables. Schemas are generally stored in a data dictionary. Although a schema is defined in text database language, the term is often used to refer to a graphical depiction of the database structure (Earp, 2011).

This schema aided the developer in outlining visually the records in the database. The schema is basically based on the designs specified on the entity relationship diagram the schema shows the structure of each table after the developer implemented the design shown on ERD.

Average Weighted Mean. The weighted average is used by professional researchers and in amateur applications. The EBSKO database have had more than 21,000 per reviewed scholarly articles together with the weighted mean and almost 70,000 peer reviewed scholar articles with phrase weighted average we get 20,300,000. On second-hand weighted average has many compensation just like: easy to count and understand the result us the same scale as the component variables, offers the opportunity of differentiating weights of the dimensions. (Grela, 2013)The developer made use of the AWM to determine the acceptability of the system by analyzing and interpreting the result of the acceptability testing results to be conducted with stakeholder. Likert scale was used to interpret the result, strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree.

Flowchart. The flowcharts use simple geometric symbols and arrows to define relationships. In programming, for instance, the beginning or end of a program is represented by an oval. A process is represented by a rectangle, a decision is represented by a diamond and an input and output process is represented by a parallelogram. The Internet is represented by a cloud (Pressman 2010). The developer will be using the flowchart to describe graphically the workflow of the existing process of the human resources department of the British College International This will then serve as the framework of the flow of the proposed system. Gantt Chart.Follow the format state, define justify