Relationship between information systems development paradigms and methods

Abstract

There are well established paradigms for information systems development but the methods used for Information Systems Development (ISD) have not been tied to most of these paradigms. Researchers have attempted to document the assumptions underlying different paradigms with the goal of making systems developers become aware of the assumptions and beliefs that they employ for a system development task. However, a number of Information Systems that have failed are as a result of lack of awareness by the information systems developers of some methods that should be used when dealing with an ISD problem. Information Systems researchers have not related ISD methods that can be used by practitioners to the identified ISD paradigms. In this paper, ISD methods have been classified under some of the major paradigms in form of a matrix. It is hoped that such classification will enable IS Developers easily identify methods they should use which in turn should lead to better quality of Information Systems, and a reduction in time and costs in Information Systems Development.