Information Systems Development through an Integrated Framework

Information systems are essential entities for several organizations who strive to successfully run their business operations. One of the major problems faced by the organizations is that many of these information systems fail, and thus the organizations do not achieve their required targets in time. Many of the reasons for the information system failures documented in the literature are related to development methodologies or frameworks that are unable to handle both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ system aspects. In general, the hard issues of the system are considered more significant than the soft issues, however, all the methodologies must be able to deal with all the system and business aspects.

This thesis investigates the possibility of developing and evaluating a multimethodology framework that can be used for information systems development in an academic and business environment. The research explores the applicability of such a framework that comprehends both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ system aspects in order to eliminate information system failures. Different software development approaches are investigated, including the dominant ‘domain-driven design’ (DDD) approach.

A new multimethodological framework entitled ‘Systemic Soft Domain Driven Design’ (SSDDDF) has been developed by combining ‘soft system methodology’ as a guiding methodology, ‘unified modelling language’ as a business domain modelling approach, and a domain-driven design implementation pattern. This framework is intended as an improvement of the DDD approach. Soft and hard techniques are integrated through mapping from the ‘consensus primary task model’ of the soft approach to the ‘use cases’ of the hard approach. In addition, ‘soft language’ is introduced as a complement to DDD’s ‘ubiquitous language’, for facilitating the communication between the different stakeholders of a project. The implementation pattern (e.g., Naked Objects) is included for generating code from domain models.

The framework has been evaluated as an information systems development approach through different undergraduate and postgraduate projects. Feedback from the developers has been positive and encouraging for further improvements in the future. The SSDDD framework has also been compared to different ISD methodologies and frameworks among of these DDD as an approach to ISD. The results of this comparison show that SSDDDF has advantages over DDD and significant improvements to DDD have been achieved.

Finally, the research suggests an agenda for further improvements of the framework, while suggesting the development of different pattern languages.