Methodologies are considered useful and influence practice, therefore we find practitioners and academics continue to develop methodologies to improve projects success rates. Knowledge and lessons learned from previous practices is embedded into these methodologies; therefore, methodologies are evolutionary and their development is an endless effort. Methodologies have been in used since 1960s and they have evolved in their approaches.
Tribal Era (1960-1970): During this period developers did not use a formalized methodology, the emphasis in this era was on understanding technologies and determining ways to solve problems. Little attention was given to the exact needs of users resulting in poor solutions that did not meet objectives. The effort was individualistic resulting in poor control and management of projects. Excessive failures called for a systematic development approach.
Authoritarian Era (1970s to early 1980s): In this era developers believed that adhering strictly to the details of methodologies ensures successful project and will meet management and users requirements. This era also produced undesired outcomes, because the emphasize was on adhering sacredly to methodologies and neglecting the fact that businesses are always in transit and have changing requirements reacting to business pressures. Methodologies in this era were seen as lacking comprehensive and flexibility.
Democratic Era (1980s to current): Unsatisfied with the restrictive approach of methodologies, new methodologies emerged with more maturity, that are more holistic based on philosophies, clear phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management and training, including success factors such as the need for user involvement. Methodologies in that era produced better business modeling techniques and can be described as being incremental, participative (sociotechnical), systemic (holistic), and business oriented i.e. alignment of IS with business strategic goals.
In this era the concept of method engineering has also emerged. Method engineering is based on the philosophy that users should be able to mix and match between the different methodologies extracting specific methods, techniques and tools depending on the current problem to be solved, rather than adhering to a single methodology.
Also, recently agile or light methodologies have emerged, and they are based on the belief that projects should be small with minimal features. These methodologies are characterized as being adaptive to the environment, having small teams, and feedbacks are very essential, teams are self-organizing, informal approach to development, flexible, participative and social collaborative.
Methodologies have been going through a phase of transformation -- moving from a mechanistic to socio-cultural paradigms or from the hard to the soft approach. See Table 5.1 for comparison between the hard and soft methodologies.
|
Hard methodology |
Soft methodology |
|---|---|
|
Used to solve well-defined problems—simple problem and solution is known. |
Used to solve Ill-structured problems—world problems are complex, ambiguous require novel solution |
|
Focus on technical perspectives, in terms of solving the problem and controlling the project. They are rational and scientific based approach |
Social constructivism, humanistic, people views are important and joint solution constructed |
|
Focus on the final outcome- reach a solution with shortest route |
The focus is on the process to encourage knowledge |
- 2382 reads
