CHAPTER 3

Chapter III

METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY

The continuous growth of the world is also the continuous change of all it has. Proponents believed that “There is nothing in this world that is constant but change”. It is due to the unsatisfied craving and¬ human consciousness to discover and search thing to support and satisfy human needs and wants. That is through developing man-made machine, devices and application in order to expressing their ideas and principles.

Among the four methodologies (the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Rapid Application Development (RAD), Joint Application Development (JAD), the proponents used the Fourth Generation Technique (4GT) because of its powerful tools in implementation. It is flexible nature in terms of accessing database and its user-friendliness.

Fourth Generation Technique (4GT) best suits the system developed. It has a characteristic that makes the system methodical and systematic. Fourth generation techniques (4GT) encompasses a broad array of software tools that have one thing in common each enables the software engineer to specify some characteristic of software at a high level. The tool then automatically generates source code based on the developer's specification. There is little debate that the higher the level at which software can be specified to a machine, the faster a program can be built. The 4GT paradigm for software engineering focuses on the ability to specify software using specialized language forms or a graphic notation that describes the problem to be solved in terms that the customer can understand.

Technique (4GT) involve different phase such as Requirements Gathering, Design Strategy, Implementation using Fourth Generation Languages and Testing.
Requirements Gathering.

The first phase of 4GT is the Requirements Gathering. This is the phase where the definition of requirements necessary in building software is defined. This is where the gathered data is translated into operational prototype, which is necessary in developing a design strategy for the system. This phase could be best done by interviewing the respondent and other people who have extensive knowledge in developing a specified system.

Design Strategy

In this phase where the gathered data is translated into a set of presentation that describes data structures, architecture, algorithmic procedures and interface characteristic. This is the phase where the proponents defined how the system is to be developed. The use of 4GT without design for large project will cause difficulties such as poor quality, poor maintenance ability, and poor customer acceptance that are often encountered when developing software using conventional approaches. All this necessary in order to proceed to the next phase called

Implementation using Fourth Generation Languages (4GL)

This the third phase of 4GT wherein the design presentation is translated to an artificial language that result in instruction that could be executed by the computer. The gathered requirements and design are put into a machine executable form using the newest programming language the Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 as a tool.

Testing

The last phase is testing, in computer hardware and software development is used at key checkpoints in the overall process to determine whether objectives are being met. This is required to ensure the system quality and that it will not create errors during run time, especially when it is being used.