Assignment II Part 2
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COMP2511 Assignment II Part 2
Due: Week 10 Wednesday, 3pm Sydney Local
Time (22nd April 2026)
DUE DATE
Week 10 Wednesday, 3pm Sydney Local Time (22nd April 2026)
Changelogs
None at the moment.
Key Notes
There are no "Short Extensions" from Special Consideration for this assignment.
5% per day late penalty calculated per-hour to the next hour. Maximum of 5 days late
penalty. No submissions will be accepted greater than 5 days after the assignment
due date.
ELS/ELP and Special Consideration will individually have a maximum of 7 days
extension.
This must be submitted on Moodle . Your submission must be a single PDF
containing all tasks in the assignment!
Please visit ELS/ELP/Speccons for Special Consideration or Equitable Learning
Plans details.
EXAMPLES FOR LATE SUBMISSIONS / EXTENSION SUBMISSIONS
COMP2511
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If you submit 5 days late (original due date + 5 days), your mark will be reduced by
25%.
If you submit 5 days, 3 hours late (original due date + 5 days, 3 hours), any work
completed after the 5 day mark will not be marked or accepted.
If you have a 7 day extension, the last submission accepted is original due date + 7
days (no late penalty submission).
If you have a 3 day extension, the last submission accepted is original due date + 3
days (extension) + 4 days (late penalty).
If you have a 7 day extension and ELP/ELS for 7 days, the last submission accepted
is original due date + 7 days + 7 days (no late penalty submission).
1. Summary
Weighting: 8% of Overall Course Mark.
This assignment focuses on content introduced from Week 7 onward. Tutorials and labs in
week 8 and 9 will explore key topics related to this assignment. This assignment's goal is
for you to practice the structural and behavioural modelling of a high-level architecture
based on a case study inspired by realistic requirements from industry. These models will
be developed using the C4 architectural notation.
You can also check out this video Assignment II Part 2 Walkthrough to help you get
started on part 2 of the assignment.
2. Case Study Description
2.1. Background
Modern businesses crucially depend on obtaining and processing quality data for efficient
decision-making. One of the major issues is that such data is often scattered across
multiple sources which makes data acquisition a very expensive process. For example, in
the area of finance, there are multiple data sources such as:
Stock market feeds
News providers
Regulatory reports
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Macroeconomic announcements
Often the mechanisms to acquire the data are very different. In some cases, data can be
downloaded, in other cases it has to be scraped from web pages. In other cases, it needs
to be extracted from PDF reports and in some cases, it is available via API calls.
In this case study, we assume that you are working as part of a financial institution that
wants to build a platform that ingests data from different price information feeds. This
data is then supplied to its customers via alerts and notifications.
3. User requirements
The list of user requirements are as follows:
You need to design a data serving platform for a financial institution that regularly
ingests, stores, and serves price information from different data sources on behalf of
its customers
A data source in this case is a price feed which can be historical or real-time prices.
Historical data is often in simple text files (like CSV file) that can be downloaded. An
example of a data source is Yahoo Finance
In general, customers prefer avoiding going to a data source directly and prefer to get
it from the financial institution.
Customers can be traders, investors, and individuals. Customers would like prices
timeseries that are customised to their needs.
Customers like to get prices timeseries in a specific data format. For example, an
Excel spreadsheet that contains a clean timeseries with a particular frequency (like
daily, hourly, minute-level prices).
Customers also want to be able to specify alerts/notifications for particular events. For
example, a customer may specify “Please send me an alert when Stock A price rises
above $1.”
Only the following four data sources may be used to ingest price data:
Investing.com
Stooq.com
Yahoo Finance
Alpha Vantage
4. Architecture needed
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As a first step in building a solution, you need to design an architecture that offers the
following advantages:
It has to support any type of price feeds with different data acquisition methods. We
assume that these methods may change over time — for example, a change in a
website's URL or in an API endpoint
It has to support pre-processing and cleaning of the data to fit customers' data format
requirements
It has to support alerts to notify customers when a specific type of event arises.
5. Assignment Requirements
5.1. Overall Tasks
In this assignment, there are 4 tasks:
1. Define the 3 most important use cases that correspond to the requirements of the
case study.
2. Consider two of the decisions you will need to make when designing your
architecture and document each in an ADR.
3. Define two architecture diagrams (Context and Container) that supports the
functionality required by the use cases using the C4 notation.
4. For one of your use cases, define a sequence diagram showing how components in
your Container diagram interact over time
TASK ORDER
Each task in the assignment builds on the one before it, so it is recommended that
you complete the tasks in order.
5.2. Task 1: Defining the Use cases (9 marks)
Based on the analysis of the requirements, define your 3 most important use cases. These
use cases represent the high priority requirements that need to be supported by the
architecture. They should cover all main features of the solution. Each use case must:
Have a clear name and support a very specific user function
Be defined in a way that only illustrates the user's perspective (not technology or
implementation dependent)
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For each use case you need to include:
Name: Title of the use case
Description: Brief description of the use case.
Primary Actors: The user(s) interacting in the system
Preconditions: Conditions that must be met before the use case starts
Postconditions: What is a changed as a result of the completed use case
Trigger: What causes the use case to start?
Main Flow: The sequence of interactions in a successful use case
Exceptional Flow: The sequence of interactions in the event of an error. You only need
to cover 1 error case. You do not need to cover all possible errors
EXAMPLE OF A USE CASE
See Lab 08 for an example of a use case. However, note that the use cases in lab08
are not independent of implementation as they refer to specific internal entities.
5.3 Task 2: Architecture Decisions (10 marks)
In this task, you will begin designing your architecture by writing 2 Architectural Design
Records (ADRs). These ADRs should document your thought process when making
architecturally significant decisions as you develop the design of your system.
Your ADRs should examine the functional requirements presented in the use cases and the
architectural characteristics inferred from the user requirements and consider the ways in
which you could design your system to accommodate them.
For each ADR you need to include:
Title: The ADR number and a concise summary of the decision.
Context: Why a decision needs to be made (what problem is this decision solving),
and all potential options under consideration. You must include at least two reasonable
potential options.
Decision: What option was picked and why.
Consequences: The trade-offs and impacts of the decision.
ADR SECTIONS
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You do not need to include the other sections of an ADR (Status, Compliance and
Notes) that are covered in the lectures.
5.4. Task 3: Defining the Architecture (15 marks)
To collectively support all of the use cases and complying with the decisions made in the
ADRs, you need to produce 2 architecture diagrams:
C4 System Context Level diagram: showing your system + users + neighbouring
systems. This is useful for Business stakeholders, execs and non-tech users.
C4 Container Level diagram: showing major application/components like web apps,
APIs, DBs. This is useful for developers, tech leads and architects.
Please make sure that:
The names of common entities (components and relations) in the 2 diagrams are
matching as one is a further decomposition of the other.
Good C4 design rules have been followed.
See C4 Diagrams Guide on C4 design specific to COMP2511.
Only one set of context and container diagrams are created. You do NOT need to
create a context and container diagram for each use case.
5.5. Task 4: Defining the Behaviour (6 marks)
For one of the use cases identified in Task 1, create a sequence diagram that illustrates
how the architecture is supporting the use case. You should include both the Main Flow
and the Exceptional Flow in the sequence diagram.
Make sure that:
Each component (vertical line) in the sequence diagram corresponds to a C4
component in your Container diagram.
Invocations between components have to be clearly labelled according to good design
rules in sequence diagrams.
See Sequence Diagrams Guide on sequence diagram design specific to
COMP2511.
6. Marking criteria
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Task Criteria
Defining the
Use Cases
9 marks
Are the use cases clearly defined and articulated?
Do use cases align with the intended purpose of the application?
Do the use cases cover all major features of the application?
Architecture
Decisions
10 marks
Are the ADRs concise and correctly formatted?
Are the problems presented clearly drawn from the use cases and user
requirements?
Are the decisions made reasonable and well justified?
Defining the
Architecture
15 marks
Has the architecture followed good C4 design practices?
Is the architecture clearly explained for a business user?
Can the architecture serve as a good implementation blueprint for a
developer?
Is the architecture flexible, open to changes and extensible with new
functionalities?
Defining the
Behaviour
6 marks
Are the interactions clearly explained according to good modelling
practices?
Is the sequence diagram aligned with the use case?
Is the sequence diagram aligned with the architecture description?
7. Resources
7.1. Information on the models
C4 Diagrams:
C4 Diagrams Guide
C4 model
C4 modelling: Visualising software architecture with the C4 model - Simon Brown,
Agile on the Beach 2019 (watch from 9:00)
Sequence Diagrams:
Sequence Diagram Guide
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7.2. Information on modelling tools
Recommended tool:
For C4 Modelling: Excalidraw — Collaborative whiteboarding made easy
For Sequence Diagrams: Mermaid Sequence Diagram Docs
VSCode extension: Markdown Preview Mermaid Support
Alternatives (with tutor approval):
Draw.io / diagrams.net: Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software is the simplest
diagramming tool out there that supports C4 diagrams, UML diagrams, and sequence
diagrams.
PlantUML: Open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw beautiful
UML diagrams. This is good for code to diagram and diagram to code but has a steep
learning curve as you will need to learn the diagramming syntax and DSL.
8. Submission
This assignment is to be submitted on Moodle . Your submission must be a single PDF
containing all diagrams!
Your submission should not include large amounts of text within an image.
SUBMISSION
You must NOT include any links in your submission. Any links provided will be
ignored, and no marks will be awarded for them. Your submission must be self
contained.
Ensure that your diagrams are readable before submission. You will not be awarded
any marks for text that cannot be read.
DO NOT WRITE PARAGRAPHS IN YOUR DIAGRAMS
Your submission for tasks 1 and 2 should not be submitted within an image. They
should instead be written on the document you submit. It must be detectable by
TurnItIn (plagiarism detection software).
You may be penalised if you include large amounts of text within an image.
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9. Other Information
9.1. Late Penalties
The late penalty for the submission is the standard UNSW late penalty of a 5% per day
reduction of the on-time assignment mark. This is calculated per-hour to the next hour. For
example, if the assignment would receive an on-time mark of 70% and was submitted 3
days late the actual mark would be 55%. An assignment submitted 1 hour late would only
have their mark reduced by .
No submissions will be accepted greater than 5 days after the assignment due date.
Please visit the ELS/ELP/Speccons for Special Consideration or Equitable Learning
Plans details.
Examples for late submissions:
EXAMPLES FOR LATE SUBMISSIONS / EXTENSION SUBMISSIONS
If you submit 5 days late (original due date + 5 days), your mark will be reduced by
25%.
If you submit 5 days, 3 hours late (original due date + 5 days, 3 hours), any work
completed after the 5 day mark will not be marked or accepted.
If you have a 7 day extension, the last submission accepted is original due date + 7
days (no late penalty submission).
If you have a 3 day extension, the last submission accepted is original due date + 3
days (extension) + 4 days (late penalty).
If you have a 7 day extension and ELP/ELS for 7 days, the last submission accepted
is original due date + 7 days + 7 days (no late penalty submission).
9.2. Extensions
Extensions are only granted in extenuating circumstances and must be approved through
either Special Consideration, which needs to be submitted prior to the assignment
deadline, or pre-arranged through an Equitable Learning Plan with Equitable Learning
Services and the Course Authority. In all cases please email cs2511@cse.unsw.edu.au.
≈24
5 0.21%
5 3 Task 2: Architecture Decisions (10 marks)
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There will be no "Short Extensions" from Special Consideration for this assignment.
Please visit the ELS/ELP/Speccons for Special Consideration or Equitable Learning
Plans details.
9.3. Plagiarism
Your assignment must be entirely your work. Plagiarism detection software will be used to
compare all submissions pairwise (including submissions for similar assignments in
previous years, if applicable) and serious penalties will be applied, including an entry on
UNSW's plagiarism register. Relevant scholarship authorities will be informed if students
holding scholarships are involved in an incident of plagiarism or other misconduct.
You are also not allowed to submit work obtained with the help of ChatGPT, GitHub
Copilot, Gemini or similar automatic tools.
Do not copy ideas or work from others.
Do not use a publicly accessible repository or allow anyone other than yourself to see
your work, except for the teaching staff of COMP2511.
Work generated by ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Gemini and similar tools will be treated
as plagiarism.
The course reserves the right to ask you to explain your work or design choices to a
member of staff as part of your submission, or complete a similar assessment.
Please refer to the on-line resources to help you understand what plagiarism is and how it
is dealt with at UNSW:
Academic Integrity and Plagiarism
UNSW Plagiarism Policy
10. Copyright Notice
Reproducing, publishing, posting, distributing or translating this assignment is an
infringement of copyright and will be referred to UNSW Student Conduct and Integrity for
action.
Last updated on 2026/3/31
Customisations ELS/ELP/Speccons
5.3 Task 2: Architecture Decisions (10 marks)
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Optional page to make some cool customis… Equitable Learning Services (ELS), Equitabl…
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