Culture - Local Video Store

¶ … CULTURE - Local video store

The contemporaneous society has become incrementally dependent upon IT and this direct relationship is obvious at all levels of the every day life. Software applications have generated a myriad of benefits within virtually every domain, commencing with the educational system, the workplace and ending with leisure activities. A relevant example of Information Technology applied to leisure operations is that of the software applications used in managing a video rental store. In this facility, there is a multitude of video cassettes (or more recently DVDs) which are rented by a multitude of customers. In a context in which some videos are so popular that they are difficult to come by, and other videos sit on the shelves for months, this paper strives to identify the relationships between these two types of classes. The first class of entities is formed from the store's customers, whilst the second class is compounded from the videos rented by the clients.

The business rules at the basis of the operational efforts within the video rental store are generally similar to those in any rental service. The customer comes in and browses through the existent collection of vides. Upon identifying the video, or videos, he desires, the customer will pick these videos up from the shelf and take them to the front desk, where they will be registered by the clerk. The customer can at this stage go home and watch the video and bring it back once he is done with it, or in accordance with the requirements of the store (generally between 1 and 3 days, with delays being charged extra). When the customer returns the video, he will hand it in to the clerk, who will process it and place it on the corresponding shelf.

The previous lines have described the generic business model governing the operations at the video rental store. Yet, a more complex IT system sits at the basis of the process. Five highly important rules define the relationships between the given entity classes. They will be succinctly presented below:

1. The store registers its customers' information (such as complete name, date of birth, address, e-mail or telephone number)

2. The store has a library of videos with the respective video copies and their location on the shelves

3. A customer can rent a video copy and it would be registered in the video store as being rented

4. Upon returning a copy, it would be placed back on its shelf (at this stage, the customer is also required to make the payment for the purchased service, but this business stage is not included in the software application)

5. The office clerk can receive notifications from the software application whenever a customer is late in returning the rented video copy / copies

Having identified the IT rules, it is now necessary to reveal the entities and their relationships within the application, which will lead to the ability to define the domain model of the application. The entities are as follows: