Question

An IT student has approached you for explanations on system development methodologies and approaches, for his class assignment.
(i). Discuss, in detail, the phases involved in the development of an information system for an organization, for him to understand.
(ii). Draw an appropriate diagram to illustrate your answer in (i) above.
(iii). Critically compare and contrast Rapid Application Development Approach and Information Engineering Approach to systems development in organizations.

Answer 1

System development methodology is a framework to create,plan, control the processes of a developing system.

(i) Phases involved in development of IS :

To develop an Information System (IS) ,there are different phases are involved are following as :

1. Requirement Analysis : It is the first phase in development of an information system. In this phase, developers need to analyze what are needed to develop a system, that means they should gather all requirements needed to develop a system.
2. Feasibility study :  ​​​​​​It is the second phase in development. In this phase developers need to study the system briefly that means they should know how to develop, what is scope of developing system, and gathered requirements are sufficient or not to develop a system.
3. Design : This is the third phase in development of information system. In this phase, the design is made to develop a system. The design contains in what that system should be developed and it shows how to connect the different modules in a system.
4. Implementation : After design phase, implementation is the fourth phase in development where coding is done to implement the different modules in a system.
5. Testing : This is the fifth phase in development of a system. In testing phase, the system is tested whether it is working correctly or not. By testing the system, bugs and errors are detected if any present in a system.
6. Evaluation : It is the final phase , which experts evaluates the system finally before deployment to use .

(ii) Diagram of phases involved in development of IS:

The above diagram represents about phases involved in development of information system. This phases are run in sequential order that means one after the other.

(iii) Comparison of Rapid application development approach and Information Engineering approach :

• Rapid application development approach and Information Engineering approach are the types of system development methodologies.
• In Rapid application development iterations can be applied to the phases where in Information Engineering approach iterations of phases can't be applied.
• In Rapid application development , Changes are accepted where in Information Engineering changes can't be accepted.
• Rapid application development is incremental and Iterative where Information Engineering is only incremental development.
• In Rapid application development, automated tools are not used where in Information Engineering approach automated tools are used to built the system.
• Rapid application development takes less time to evaluate the system where Information Engineering approach takes more time to evaluate the system.
• Rapid application development needs less teams to develop a system where Information Engineering approach needs large teams to develop the system.
• Rapid application development approach is a faster development method when compared to Information Engineering approach because information engineering approach takes long term evaluation of a developing system.