1. Introduction on theories of system development

Post date: 06-May-2015 10:53:41

The aim of all these theories and methods is to identify business requirements and to develop information systems that effectively meet them

Some of these theories include:

Traditional approach
Rapid Application Development (RAD)
The structured approach

1. Traditional Approach

It relies mostly on the skills and experience of individual staff members carrying out the project. There are no formal procedures followed and therefore the success of the system is dependent on individual effort. In this approach, the manual system is replaced with a computerised one without change in overall structure of the former system, hence the weaknesses of the former system are not addressed and are carried forward to the new system.

2. Rapid Application Development (RAD)

RAD is also known as prototyping. A prototype is a sample used to test a concept or a process

this is a concept that products can be developed faster and of higher quality through:

Gathering requirements using workshops or focus groups
Prototyping and early, reiterative user testing of designs
The re-use of software components
A rigidly paced schedule that defers design improvements to the next product version
Less formality in reviews and other team communication

Advantages of the RAD model:

Reduced development time.
Increases re-usability of components
Quick initial reviews occur
Encourages customer feedback
Integration from very beginning solves a lot of integration issues.

Disadvantages of RAD model:

Depends on strong team and individual performances for identifying business requirements.
Only system that can be modularized can be built using RAD
Requires highly skilled developers/designers.
High dependency on modeling skills
Inapplicable to cheaper projects as cost of modeling and automated code generation is very high.

3. The Structured Approach