System Failure Analysis and System Design: A Report

This report provides a detailed analysis of the Novopay payroll system failure, examining the system's architecture, design errors, and the impact of these errors on the system's performance. The report begins with an overview of the Novopay payroll system and its implementation, highlighting the issues that arose post-implementation. It delves into the specific design errors, including problems with ALESCO, Novopay Online, and the Novopay Service Desk Application. The report also explores improper requirements gathering, scheduling issues, diagram flaws, bugs in the system, poor development practices, and a poor user interface as contributing factors to the system's failure. Furthermore, the report outlines the high-level requirements for the project team and schedule, and it includes a system design specification, covering software engineering modeling, traceability, and a strategy for testing. The report concludes with individual contributions and a bibliography.

Running head: SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
System Failure Analysis and System Design
Name of the Student
Name of the University

1SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Table of Contents
Part A: Consultant’s Report.............................................................................................................2
1. Analysis of Novopay Payroll System:.....................................................................................2
2. Design Errors:..........................................................................................................................3
3. Requirement and Scope:..........................................................................................................8
Part B: System Design Specification.............................................................................................10
1. Software Engineering Modelling:..........................................................................................10
2. Traceability:...........................................................................................................................12
3. Strategy for Testing:..............................................................................................................13
4. Individual Report:..................................................................................................................14
Bibliography:.................................................................................................................................15

2SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Part A: Consultant’s Report
1. Analysis of Novopay Payroll System:
Overview of Novapay and Payroll System: Novapay, well known as an education payroll
system, was established in the year 2012. Talent2 was the provider of the payroll system that the
organization is using. Throughout the year, the system provide services to the approximately
0.11 million persons who are employed by the schools (two thousand and five hundred
approximately in size) (Cranefield & Oliver, 2014). Almost fifteen individual agreements has
been used for employing the persons. The organization does its business through the concept of
outsourcing. The origination of the implementation had begun in 2005 when government
minister took the decision that the payroll system of Novapay is in need of modification. At that
time, Talent2 took the project with the most suitable bid.
Issues with the Payroll System: After the implementation of the system, it started to
create issues in the business processes. The performance of the system was not adequate for
business or as hoped for. It is not that each of the users were experiencing the issues regarding
the bad system performance (Raza, Clear & MacDonell, 2017). Most of the users had received
accurate payments at the right time but few of the users did not. As big business are consist of
several business processes and conditions, it is not possible to test the system functionality at one
testing phase. The issues are identified post implementation and these issues are mitigated step
by step. The processing errors are generated through the usability problems and inadequate data
input validation. It has been found that the large-scale payroll system deployments also faces
various defects. By May 2013, additional eighty one schools were repeatedly reporting against
the issues that were faced by the users (Clear, Raza & MacDonell, 2013). According to the report

3SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
presented by Novapay Minister, total three hundred and fifty three users were facing issues
regarding the lack of performance of the payroll system. Thirty six users did not get any
payment, one hundred and ninety five users get less payment and one hundred and twenty two
users got more than expected. This report showed that the number of affected person increased
from two hundred and twenty eight to three hundred and fifty three (Cranefield & Oliver, 2014).
In percentage, the increase rate was fifty five percent approximately.
As it has been stated above, the system started creating issues. These issues were reported
by the affected users. The employees of the school reported that payment issues are happening as
soon as they started getting payment through the system. The issues were become so big by time
that it became the headline of New Zealand (Clear, Raza & MacDonell, 2013). At some point the
quantity of errors in the system reached eighteen thousands. The increase of payroll issues were
not getting to any end. All of these errors were maintained through the human interventions.
2. Design Errors:
The key components of the payroll system were Alesco, interfaces, Novopay Online,
hosting environments and Novopay Service Desk Application. The description of these
components will elaborate the internal architecture of the payroll system further.
ALESCO: The ALESCO is one of the popular application products that has been utilized
to manage and process payroll related information. All the information is mainly processed
within this core payroll engine. Moreover, within this core engine, the payrolls are calculated and
settled regarding individual pay period. The organization is famous for its various third party
interfaces (Clear, 2013). The application, ALESCO, is generated on the basis of PL/SQL and
Oracle Forms through the use of Oracle Database. Talent2 staff was only authorized for using the
ALESCO application in the context of Novopay.

4SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Novopay Online: NOL or Novopay Online is referred to as the interface that the
administrative employees has been using within the schools. Moreover, this interface is mainly
used for entering and updating the information of payroll of the staff. Through the interface, the
staff will be able to see and process payroll and employee information regarding individual
schools. As the name suggests, the Novopay Online can be accessed through any system by the
administrative staff. However, the staff will need to login to the system through the valid id and
password (Raza, Clear & MacDonell, 2015). If the system browser support the page and
computer system has proper internet connection, the interface can be accessed. The staff can
access the online page each of the days in a week but from 7 O’clock in the morning to 7
O’clock in the evening. As it is only a webpage, included of Novopay web applications, any
specific software and hardware is required.
Novopay Service Desk Application: NSDA is workflow application or tool (preferably)
that is used by the system for managing the form processing. The users send support mails and
service to the particular address that are routed toward the tool. The service desk is not an
integral part of the payroll system.
Hosting Environment: The hosting of the parts has been done from the data centres in
New Zealand on storage hardware and dedicated server. The disaster recovery system is
implemented in a completely different location.

5SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Figure 1: Novopay Component Diagram
(Source: Clear, 2013)
Design Issues: Now form the comments of the Payroll system, it has been discovered
that not parts of the system were responsible for processing the data. The ALESCO and NOL has
been responsible for processing the payroll related data. The real issues has been identified
within the ALESCO application. A particular drawback of PL/SQL, a part of the ALESCO
technology, inadequate I/O features may has been a cause of the processing errors. The issues
illustrates that in case of read, write or both operations, the support of the I/O is very poor
(Myalapalli & Dussa, 2015). This may cause to obtaining accurate and adequate data at the time
of payroll processing. The issues with the Oracle form may has been an issues in designing or
architecture of the system.

6SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Other design issues are usability, inadequate data validation process, poorly designed
reports. The usability issue describes that the users were having issues regarding the usage of the
system for expected processes or requests. The data validation is a crucial step that is not
properly done. As the forms are not working well, the validation had been rising as an issue.
Improper Requirements: The requirement gathering process is a very crucial and critical
task of the project. The system analyst remains responsible for gathering the system requirements
and business analyst for business requirements. These two requirements are equally important.
The system may have been malfunctioning because of the issues in the business requirements
that lead to inadequate system requirements. The system requirements are used for generating the
system functionalities. These issues may have the reason for these payment issues. The system
may not be able to cope with the business environment. In various cases it has been seen that
bugs in the coding are making the issues. However, in this case, the codes are based on the
business processes of NivaPay so the possibility of causing the issue due to lack of
authentication of the requirement is very high.
Improper Scheduling: Providing proper time for individual stages are very crucial for a
project. The project may have allotted less time than required for system design and coding
activities. The system may seem like an easy one but the operations it carry out is very large
scale. If proper time were allocated to the individual project activities then the system would
have been able to prevent the errors to occur. Novapay system error is internal and not possible
to repair without shutting it down. Now, the time it will consume is much more than it were
required during the project. The required resource is also bigger. This will affect the users very
bad. Overall, the improper scheduling can be a reason behind the errors in the system of
Novapay.

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Diagram Issues: Based on the designing made in the system design phase or activity, the
system is developed. The functions, variables and connection between the units are drawn based
on the generated diagrams. If any connection flaws remain in these diagrams then it may lead to
various issues like the importer functionality, errors in the operation and many more. Exactly
these issues has been identified in the case of NovaPay system. The system was generating issues
from the beginning of the deployment and still not has been repaired properly. The designs of the
systems may have included some crucial and errors in the core parts of the system that may have
cause the inconvenient processing of data. If the diagrams are analysed, may be the part based on
which the system issues are generating can be found. The class diagram must be able to include
all the potential attribute and entities. The UML diagram should be able to consider all the
interaction among the user and system.
Bugs in the System: The programmers may have not been able to provide the accurate
and fragile coding to support the system functionalities. The programmers may not been able to
implement that kind of large infrastructure within a single application. The bugs can remain in
the payment acceptance or calculation part of the system, or it may be because of other section of
application which has impact on that section. This bugs are very crucial to remove. The testing
team should have identified all that gap in the system and informed the development team. The
error may also remain in the database system. The application may have issues with saving the
data within the database. The data may be are becoming corrupted till those reach the database,
or because of the huge set of data, all the data are not maintained properly.
Poor Development Practice: Usage of poor development practices one of the major
issues that may been the cause of these errors. The development practice consider, programing,
connecting and testing. The ALESCO and NOL has been responsible for processing the payroll

8SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
related data. The real issues has been identified within the ALESCO application. A particular
drawback of PL/SQL, a part of the ALESCO technology, inadequate I/O features may has been a
cause of the processing errors. The programmers may not been able to implement that kind of
large infrastructure within a single application. The bugs can remain in the payment acceptance
or calculation part of the system, or it may be because of other section of application which has
impact on that section.
Poor User Interface: A poor UI may cause critical issues for clients of the framework
and along these lines extraordinarily improve the probability of those clients acquainting with the
framework information for instance that causes framework disappointment. In bookkeeping
programming for instance a solitary misstep because of poor UI may make a receipt be sent to
somebody in the wrong money or may transform what should be a receipt into a credit note.
While not significant issues, more often than not, information that is mistaken may influence the
framework to come up short.
3. Requirement and Scope:
High Level Requirement: The high level requirements of the project are as following.
1) Project Team: The project team must be consisting of different person with
different skills. Putting a single person into in charge of several tasks will end up
as project failure. The team will be formed with system analyst, business analyst,
coder, tester, database developer, network designer and project manager.
2) Schedule: The schedule is a very important part of the project. It maintains the
deadline of the small activities within a project phase. The project manager ca
schedule the project various ways.

9SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
3) System Requirements: The functional and non-functional requirements are most
crucial part of the project requirements. The system analyst will identify the
system requirements based on business requirements.
Scope: The scope of the project are very intact and small. First, developing a large scale
and complete payroll system. Second, communicating all the schools during the project. Third,
creating the interfaces for school staff administrator and interface to external organization.
Fourth, interface for service desk. Fifth, connecting the webpage with the ALESCO through
powerful firewall and web content filtering appliance.

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Part B: System Design Specification
1. Software Engineering Modelling:
Figure 2: The ER Diagram of Payroll System
(Source: Created by Author)

11SYSTEM FAILURE ANALYSIS AND SYSTEM DESIGN
Figure 3: The Use Case Diagram of Payroll System
(Source: Created by Author)