Jefferson County School System - Case Study Example

The paper "Jefferson County School System" is a great example of a case study on education. Initially, software development involved programmers' designings to facilitate a procedure/program or to solve a problem. This however changed when systems became so big and complex for an individual to develop and maintain them. Therefore, a team of specialists like programmers, architects, testers, analysts and users would work together to create and maintain a system. This new trend is what is referred to as the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and is what was adopted by the Jefferson County School. JCS abandoned its initial software in favor of SDLC to improve service delivery and also to reduce the cost of maintaining the system by cutting down on the number of system administrators/personnel. 

Though SDLC was thought of as the Magnus opus of the institution, the system turned out to be the opposite. In fact, the only advantage it had over the traditional system was that it was a bit faster and could support and process more information. Aside from that, SDLC proved too complex for normal users. This is despite the fact that the workers had been given two-week training on the system prior to its use. It is worth noting that traditional systems were problem-oriented, that is, once a problem is discovered a program is created to solve the problem. However, this is not the case with SDLC. Traditional systems allowed users to be in control of the problem-solving process. SDLC, on the other hand, is designed to be in control as they reduce the role of users to keying in specific instructions while the main instructions are specified during the development of the system.
For instance, JCS personnel complained that the new system controlled everything to the point that it even rejected admitting students in classes with fewer students. Therefore, there were discrepancies in the number of students in each class, unlike in the previous system where everything was uniform. Due to its rigidity, the SDLC model poses a serious threat to a dynamic institution that constantly grows and changes. This is because remodeling, restructuring and recoding SDLC systems are hard and may take a long time, not putting into consideration the amount of money that would be used in the process. JCSS personnel was forced to adapt to this system due to the amount of money that the institution had put into the project. Read More