Scenario Motor Point (MP) is a small business renting cars in your local area that has grown significantly in the last five years. Specifically, the number of employees has been increased from 25 to...

Scenario


Motor Point (MP) is a small business renting cars in your local area that has grown significantly in the last five years. Specifically, the number of employees has been increased from 25 to 100 in the last 5 years and the turnover from £100k to £500k. It has been planned to open four additional branches next year.  Part of the reason for the company’s success has been their strong work culture.
The company’s founders wanted to focus on using information technology and innovation to improve sales further. The current system works fairly well, however, only offline, as the company does not have presence online. This is a major disadvantage for the company and hence the founder, John believes in e-commerce and wants to go online. After several weeks of consultations with his senior staff, John decided to implement a system for online renting to increase the business further and is ready to invest substantially. Davis, the head of MP IT department, which looks after their local network of computers, printers etc., is very optimistic that his IT department can setup and provide the necessary IT infrastructure. However, he is also aware of many solutions like outsourcing the whole system development and SasS (Software as Service) and HasS (Hardware as Service), which are part of cloud computing.
TASKS






1.    Near accurate time and cost estimation are extremely important for any project to be successful. Assuming you have been asked to estimate the cost and time for this project, critically evaluate the applicability and suitability of different type of estimation methods. [500 words]


Part2: Planning


Scenario


You have an important role to play as a team member of this project and should finish it successfully within budget and on time, not compromising any functional requirements for a typical e-commerce website. You promote the idea of working with highly talented and motivated individuals who can work well on self-managed teams.


After several consultations with John and staff at MP over 8 weeks, several functional and non-functional requirements have been identified and documented. These requirements have to be analysed and a solution has to be designed, implemented, tested and deployed. Some non-functional requirements like online security have become very important, as online fraud has become very sophisticated.