Joint Application Development (JAD)

Developing Systems Requires Teamwork: JAD

Also called Joint Applications Design (JAD)

Designing and developing systems is much easier if the entire system can be built by one person. In fact, that is one of the strengths of recent tools—they enable a single person to build complex systems with less effort than in the past. However, many information systems, especially those that affect the entire organization, require teams of IS workers. As soon as multiple designers, analysts, and programmers are involved, everyone encounters management and communication problems.

MIS researchers have measured the effects of these problems. One study by DeMarco and Lister showed that on large projects, 70 percent of a developer’s time is spent working with others. Jones noted that team activities accounted for 85 percent of the development costs. There seem to be substantial areas for improvement in systems development by focusing on teamwork.

One of the most difficult steps in creating any new system is determining the user requirements. What does the system need to do and how will it work? This step is crucial. If the designers make a mistake here, the system will either be useless or will need expensive modifications later.

Prototyping and SDLC (Systems Development Life Cycle) take different approaches to this problem. With SDLC, analysts talk with users and write reports that describe how the system will operate. Users examine the reports and make changes. This approach is time consuming and difficult for users because they only see paper notes of the proposed system.

Prototyping overcomes some of the problems by letting users work with actual screens and reports. But use of prototyping is hard to expand beyond one or two users. Some companies overcome the problems of SDLC by prototyping each input screen and report with one or two primary users. Once the main concepts have been designed, the analysts formalize the system and get approval from other users. The designs are then given to programmers to create with the traditional SDLC development methods. An important reason for using SDLC is to obtain the views and agreement of many users. Using traditional interview methods and paper documentation, this process often takes several months. Each change has to be reexamined by other users, and disagreements have to be resolved.