Book Exchange Requirements Document

 

1. Introduction

1.1 Overview

College students are poor.  Graduate students are even more so.  We want to try to save every penny we can.  Since textbooks are among the major money-draining necessities, we want to implement a system to facilitate trading of used textbooks among students.  Students will log on to our site, enter the books they want to sell, the books they want to buy, and, when there is a match, contact each other to complete the transaction. 

Students will be required to sell books at half of the new book price.  This will save the hassles of pricing the books.  In the best case scenario, a student can buy a used book for half the price, and, assuming the price of that book doesn’t change for a year, sell the same book back for the price that the student bought it for.  This way, even though no one is “making money” per se, everyone benefits.

1.2 Business Context

This endeavor is essentially anti-business.  It will be hated by the college bookstores around the country because they won’t be able to make profit from transacting used books.  The students, however, will gain greatly from the money they can save through this system.

2. General Description

2.1 Product Function

Students will be able to log onto our site and create login name and password.  That ID will allow them to store the books they want to buy or sell in a database.  If there is a match with the books that are already in the database, the student will be given a buyer/seller’s e-mail address.  They can then contact each other to hand over the books and money.

A seller can keep all the books that she wants to sell in the on-line database so that she won’t have to enter the books in every time she visits the system. 

2.2 Similar System Information

Websites like Dailyjolt.com have book exchange systems.  However, their idea of book exchange consists of students posting ads on a bulletin board.  This method is very time consuming and does not properly leverage the capability of the internet.  Furthermore, no one has the time to read through thousands of for-sale ads. 

A better way is to manage the transactions like an online bookstore.  There are tons of websites that sell books.  Anyone with a computer can set up an online store using services provided by companies like Yahoo!.  However, all those services require a fee and none of them provide the specific book exchange capabilities that we require.  Since we have the technical capability, we decide to make, not reinvent, the wheel for our specific use.   

2.3 User Characteristics

Users will be poor college students, although being poor is not a requirement.  As such, their computer-usage skill will be sufficient to browse and complete transactions on our website. 

Users are also not limited to college students.  They can be residents from the area surrounding the campus who wants to buy and sell used books.  As long as they have an e-mail address, they can participate in the exchange.

2.4 User Problem Statement

College students want to sell the books they no longer need.  Traditionally, they can either post flyers, talk to their friends, or sell the books back to the bookstore for a meager sum.  These activities are time consuming and garner little revenue.  It is the goal of the system to bring buyers and sellers together and simplify the process.

2.5 User Objectives

The user interface should be easily understood and operated by college students. 

More functionalities will be added as permitted by technical and time constraints.

The database technology employed by the system should be easy to maintain and deploy in schools around the country.

2.6 General Constraints

The book exchange system must be accessible by anyone with Internet Explorer or Netscape 4.0 compatible browsers.

The time lapse while performing any database query or insertion should not exceed more than a minute as users are impatient. 

The technology used should be as simple as possible so students from other universities can adopt the system.

2.7 Future Possibilities

There can be several upgrades to the system, with each upgrade further simplifying the book exchange. 

1) When new books are entered into the database and the books match those that are in demand, the buyer will be notified via e-mail.

2) After a student enters the course numbers, the system will give her a list of the books she needs to buy.  The student will not have to enter the books individually. 

3) Faculties will be able to log on to the system to add/drop books for the courses. 

4) A web crawler will access on-line shop bots to determine the average price that a particular book is selling for.  It will then half that price and attach it to the books in the system.

5) For the books that a user buys from the system, they will be automatically entered into her bookshelf.  The user can then choose books from her bookshelf to sell any time she wants.

6) The students should be able to enter an ISBN number and, if the book does not exist in the database, the database will search on the website and find the title and the author for the book.

7) Students can organize a campus wide book exchange week.  The books will be gathered in one room and sorted alphabetically by the seller’s e-mail address.  Sellers can print little book slips from our system.  The slips will identify thebuyer’s e-mail address and the price of the books.  Buyers will then pay for the books when they come to pick them up.  The money will be paid to the seller after the event is over.

Unfortunately, due to the limited time, these upgrades are beyond the scope of the current project.

3. Functional Requirements

1. Enter books user want to buy.

a. Description

Users enter the ISBN numbers of the books they wan to buy through the browser. The user interface will be designed to allow users to enter multiple ISBN numbers. When user presses return button, the requirement will send to the server, and the server will then check the database to see if they are available or not.

   

b. Criticality

This is one of the major functions of the system. If this functionality is affected, the basic purpose of having such a system is defeated. The criticality of this requirement for the system is high.

2. Enter books user wants to sell.

a. Description

User enter the ISBN numbers of the books they want to sell through the browser. The user interface will be designed to allow user to enter multiple ISBN numbers at one time. When user enters return button, the requirement will send to the server, the server then insert the data to the database.

b. Criticality

                  This is also one of the major functions of the system. The criticality of this

                   requirement for the system is high.

3. Run Queries on books

a. Description

Once user queries are submitted, the system must be able to execute them. The queries are first wrapped in valid SQL statements, then sent to the database server.  If there are matches for the books that a buyer wants, the buyer will be notified via the browser and given the sellers’ contact information.

If a query cannot find the book, the user will be asked to fill out a form to create a new book record in the database. 

b. Criticality

This requirement is critical, because only after running the queries will users know if their requested books are available. 

c. Dependencies with other functions

The queries are run after user enters the queries.

4. Enter information for books not in database

      a. Description

     

When a search for a book turns up nothing, the user will be asked to enter the book title and the author name so future user’s won’t have to enter the same information.

b. Dependencies with other functions

This function will be activated after a search on ISBN yields nothing.

5. Display query results

a. Description

The result of the executed query must be displayed to the user. If the books are available, the browser will display a list of available books and the corresponding book name, ISBN, price, and owner’s email address. A checkbox next to each book allows the user a final chance to back away from purchasing.

If there are no books available in the database, a message is displayed.

b. Technical issues

The book information is stored in tables with Microsoft Access. ODBC bridge and JDBC are used to establish the connection between database and Jigsaw server.

c. Dependencies with other requirements

The results are received from the searching query. This function requirement also interacts with the Help function in the case of an error.

6. Provide user with book owner’s contact information

a. Description

The book owner’s email address is displayed as part of the query result. The buyer can contact with the book owner about delivery etc. after buying the book.

b. Criticality

This system does not provide email alert to the book owner about the buyer’s contact information. It is critical that the book owner’s contact information be displayed to the buyer.

c. Technical issues

The book owner’s email is stored in Microsoft Access as one column of the Book table.

d. Dependencies with other requirements

The results are received from the searching query. This function requirement also interacts with the Help function in the case of an error.

7. Provide online help and tutorial

a. Description

Extensive on-line help will be provided to the user. This will include the explanatory text near each field prompting for user input, and error messages received in the application.

b. Technical issues

GUI elements are used to provide better user interaction and to improve help requirement.