You were just hired as an IT Specialist for Smalltown School District. Your first assignment is to review a problem area& in
student records processing. It seems that the program currently used to compute student grade point averages and class rankings runs terribly slow and as a result end of year reports are habitually late. Your are asked to come up with a list of items that should be checked in order to determine if a modification to code is in order. The IT department head is asking you to do this without the opportunity to actually see the current application/programs in use. What questions would you ask about the current code? What areas of code would you look at? What would you need to know about the student data?
There are various questions that you can ask in this scenario, such as
What grading policies are being implemented?
How many student grades are being calculated by the program?
What is the requirements for a student to pass?
All of these questions would allow you to get an idea of how extensive the code may be and its complexity. Once you know this you would look at the code revolving around actually looping through the data and doing the necessary calculations. You can then determine how to manipulate the code and make it much more efficient.
You would also need to know how the student data is being saved, which will help determine if it is the best data structure for saving this type of data or if it can be replaced in order to maintain the data secure while increasing the speed of the program. Mainly since this information needs to be continuously used from the data structure.
