Nash News Agent

Nash has recently taken over a local news agency in Stourbridge. Part of the deal was the sale of a laptop and software called Newsflash which manages all local newspaper deliveries and payments. The laptop recently crashed and all data including the customer information was lost. Luckily, there is a single paper based copy of customer details, newspapers orders and deliveries. To remedy the situation, Nash has asked a local software development company to design and develop software which will manage newspaper deliveries and payments. Below is a description of the systems functionality. Nash has asked that the software you develop is online so that customers can have access to it view their account information. However, they should not be able to make changes directly themselves. To access their accounts customers must register online and access using an email and password.

Systems Requirements

Customers place orders for newspaper/magazine deliveries in the shop. There are currently over 300 different kinds of newspapers and magazines which the customer can order. A customer must make any new order for either a newspaper or magazine one week in advance, so that the order can be placed with the distributor. There are three types of deliveries AM, PM and Sunday. There is an additional cost of 15p, 30p and 50p respectively for each type of delivery. This is added to the bill regardless of the number of the newspapers/magazines delivered to each customer.

Each week the sales assistant allocates weekly delivery jobs to the five delivery people currently employed. Each delivery person can have anything from 20-50 houses to deliver to. A job sheet is produced on a daily basis for the delivery person so that they know which papers need to go to which house. It is the responsibility of the delivery person to collect those newspapers/magazines which they are delivering and sort them appropriately to take with them.

The sales assistant produces invoices for each customer based on the items ordered, delivery costs and total cost for the week. Once a week customers make full payment for their orders in the shop and balances are cleared. If a customer cannot make full payment then the outstanding cost is added to the following week. Customers can also cancel orders i.e. as they are on holiday. A week's advance warning is given and cancellation can be made for up to two weeks. After which the deliveries resume once again. No costs are incurred by the customer during this period. Customers can also permanently cancel deliveries however a week's prior notice must be given and all payment balances must be cleared before the account is closed. A customer can amend orders at any time before the changes will only take affect a week later.

Question 1
a. Develop a class diagram for the required system complete with stereotype classes, attributes, operations, associations, association names and multiplicities.
b. Develop a State Chart diagram for the object 'Order'
c. Discuss and define the following by providing an example to illustrate your definition.
i) Inheritance ii) Aggregation iii) Composition

Question 2
a. Explain what a distributed system is and give an ?example of networks that belongs to such a system.
b. Describe a client server model and how World Wide Web applications function based on such a model.
c. Explain what advantages a client server model provides with regard to network management.
d. Identify and explain each of the layers in three-tier architecture.