Analysis with CLUES

Students taking a first course in Systems Analysis often have little commercial or industrial experience. When given a textual description as the basis for an assignment they, typically, have difficulty in knowing how to extract the initial information needed to start creating data and process models. This paper describes CLUES, a technique that assists students in forming useful abstractions from a textual description. It provides a stepwise method for manipulating these abstractions to synthesise activities and entities for a proposed system. A brief description is given of the operations of a proposed support tool and some enhancements to the technique are discussed