Cafe Management System Architecture/Design Document

Cafe management system
Architecture/Design Document

Table of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................3
2 DESIGN GOALS........................................................................................................4
3 SYSTEM BEHAVIOR...............................................................................................5
3.1 System Requirements.............................................................................................5
3.2 Functional Requirements of the Café Management System...............................5
3.3 Desired System Behavior.......................................................................................6
4 LOGICAL VIEW.......................................................................................................6
4.1 High-Level Design (Architecture).........................................................................6
4.2 Mid-Level Design....................................................................................................9
4.3 Detailed Class Design...........................................................................................11
5 PROCESS VIEW ....................................................................................................12
6 DEVELOPMENT VIEW........................................................................................13
7 PHYSICAL VIEW...................................................................................................14
8 USE CASE VIEW....................................................................................................15
9 Discussion and Conclusion........................................................................................15

1 Introduction
This document describes the architecture and design for the Café Management System
being developed for the Azure Food Café in Melbourne. The proposed system will be
used to manage every facet of the café’s operations from user sign-in/sign-out, orders
processing, reports generation and generation of payrolls for the staff – based on number
of hours worked on the system. The system will have four main interfaces; an
administrative interface, a cashier interface, sales interface; that will be accessed by the
café waiters and waitresses and a chef’s interface, for adding and modifying menu
offerings. The waiters will access the system a centralized touch screen terminal where
they will be required to login, and key in the orders. The waiter’s terminal will print a bill
with a copy of the bill also printed at the cashier’s terminal.
The purpose of this document is to describe the architecture and design of the proposed
system, in a way that addresses the interests and concerns of all major stakeholders.
For the case of the Azure Food Café Management system, the key stakeholders include;
 Waiter/Waitresses/Servers: This group of stakeholders wants assurance that the
proposed system will provide efficient and easy to access functionalities and
exhibit desirable non-functional qualities such as reliability, usability and a short
learning curve.
 Cashier: the cashier expects an architecture which minimizes complexity and
makes features easily accessible. The design should also exhibit non-functional
qualities such as usability, security and stability.
 Developers: with the weight of implementing the system sitting on the shoulders
of the system developers, they want an architecture that minimizes complexity as
well as development effort.
 Café Manager: the manager wants a stable, reliable and easy to use system that
is easy to maintain and is always available. As such, reliability and availability of
the system are the key design goals that have to be achieved and must be
incorporated in the architectural design of the proposed system.
 Project Manager: managing a project is always a daunting task, it requires
significant planning efforts. Conventionally, a project manager has to manage
project resources and schedule, in order to produce the project deliverables. For
that reason, the project manager want an architecture that can easily sub-divide
the project tasks into manageable work packages; where resources can easily be
assigned and appropriate scheduling performed.
 Maintenance Officer: the IT personnel responsible for day-to-day management
and maintenance of the system want an architecture that is easy to maintain and
evolve over time. To this group of stakeholders, stability and maintainability are
the key factors to be considered.

Although efforts have been made to address the requirements of each stakeholder, it is
not possible to meet all the requirements of all individual stakeholders (Pham, 2001).
With that in mind, the priority of demands to be made has to be rationalized and only the
most critical aspects of the system design taken into consideration. Expressing all the
system’s architecture design is therefore not possible in a single diagram. This document
therefore employs a number of diagrammatic models to express various design aspects,
views and perspectives. For the Café Management System, architecture design is
expressed in 4 main perspectives;
 Logical View: the logical view expresses the design of the proposed Café
Management System by first extracting the system components, key operations
and attributes of the identified components. The logical view will also outline the
component’s relationships as well as their interactions (Mannisto, Savolainen and
Myllarniemi, 2008). Since the development of the proposed system will follow an
Object oriented design, the logical view is expressed through high level
architectural designs, sequence diagram and class diagrams.
 Process View: the process view in this project describes processes and the various
threads of controls that are used to execute the operations that make up the Café
Management System. A high level architecture diagram developed in the logical
view is used to show the various sections where control threads are located,
followed by a detailed explanation of the specific thread functions.
 Development View: with all components, functions and control threads identified
and documented in the logical and process views, this view outlines how the
modules map to the whole development plan.
 Use Case View: this view is used in this project to validate the design activities.
With use cases, one is able to step through a given scenario and its requirements
and identify if the flow meets the expectations and required functional objectives.
2 Design Goals
Theoretically, there are no defined measures of distinguishing good or bad system design.
The values of any specific design are largely dependent on stakeholder priorities
(Mannisto, Savolainen and Myllarniemi, 2008). Depending on prevailing operating
environment, nature of users and other factors, usability of a system may be of greater
importance than maintainability or vise-versa. For the proposed Café Management
System, usability and accuracy of data is of critical importance. Being a food vending
hotel, the management wants a system that can provide insight into business operations;
with great emphasis on being able to get insightful information, which will be used to
determine the profitability of the venture. Secondly, the management is concern with how
fast the waiters/waitress and table servers will be able to create orders and generate bills
for the sitting-in customers. For that reason, usability of the system is top on the priorities
list. The other design priority is on simplicity of the user interface to lower the learning