Название: Developing Information Systems Accurately: A Wholistic Approach
Автор: Bert de Brock
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2023
Страниц: 265
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 17.3 MB

This textbook shows how to develop the functional requirements of (information) systems. It emphasizes the importance to consider the complete development path of a functional requirement, i.e. not only the individual development steps but also their proper combination and their alignment.

Even after decades of numerous bad experiences, many software development projects are still failing on at least one or even all three basic requirements for a project:

- Too little:
The project delivers inadequate functionality

- Too late:
The project is not within time

- Too costly: The project is not within budget

Or, even worse, the project has been ended prematurely, usually after a lot of time and money have been spent, and without delivering any working functionality...

The reasons for those failures usually lie at the very beginning: There is no clarity in what the customer really wants and needs, leading to incomplete and even wrong specifications, and subsequently programmers who fill in the functional gaps to the best of their own understanding. So, it is very important to get really clear what the customer wants and exactly needs and to make unambiguous, correct, and complete functional specifications. As a consequence, the programmers do not have to fill in functional gaps themselves anymore, thus avoiding many of the misunderstandings. As the title and subtitle of the textbook already indicate, this textbook is about developing information systems in an accurate way, taking a wholistic approach.

The book consists of two parts: Part I presents the underlying theory while Part II contains various illustrative case studies. Part I starts with an introduction to the topic (Chapter 1). Then it explains how to develop functional requirements that represent the conceptual dynamics of an information system (Chapters 2 and 3). Chapters 4 and 5 explain how to model the conceptual statics of an information system. Chapter 6 gives some directions for implementation. Finally, Chapter 7 explains how a ‘technical manager’ can organize and manage the development process.

As an illustration of the theory, Part II contains three substantial case studies. The first one (Chapter 8) presents a stepwise development starting from an informal situation sketch via a simple domain model towards a precisely specified, full-fledged conceptual data model, which finally is translated to an SQL database. In the second case study (Chapter 9) the author converts the well-known non-trivial use case Process Sale from Larman into a textual System Sequence Description (SSD). For validation purposes, that textual SSD is subsequently translated into natural language and into a graphical SSD. The third case study (Chapter 10) shows the applicability of the author’s approach to a control system and also illustrates the typical situation that the requirements are constantly changing during development.

This book is written for (under)graduate students in software engineering or information systems who want to learn how to carry out adequate problem analysis, to make good system specifications, and/or to understand how to organize and manage an IS-development process. It also targets practitioners who want to improve their problem analysis abilities and/or their ability to make good system specifications. To this end, it includes more than 150 explanatory figures and is accompanied by a Web site which provides additional course material such as slides, additional exercises, solutions to exercises, and the code for the figures used in the book.