SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY USEIN SOUTH AFRICA

摘要

The objective of this study is to describe the development environment, the activities performed, and the usernof systems development methodologies in IS departments in South Africa. Our results indicate thatrnorganisations in South Africa are developing systems in a multiple platform environment, supported by multiplernoperating systems, using both local and wide area networks. Multiple programming languages are used forrnthe development of new systems and for the maintenance of legacy systems. The most popular programmingrnlanguages used in South Africa are Visual Basic, Cobol, Oracle, C, C++, and RPG. PC-based environmentsrnand operating systems seem to be the most popular.rnIS departments of the responding organisations spend half of their time on maintenance, 31% of their time onrnthe development of new applications and 15% on the customisation of packages. Focusing on the developmentrnof new applications, IS departments spend a third of their time on planning, analysis and design, another thirdrnon programming, and a third on testing, installation and evaluation.rnWe defined systems development methodologies as a combination of systems development techniques, processrnmodels, methods and approaches. Systems development techniques are used most intensively during thernrequirements analysis phase and during maintenance. The phased process model, characterised by successivernphases such as feasibility study, requirements analysis, design, implementation and installation, is the mostrnpopular systems development process model, used most intensively in the IS departments. This is followed byrnevolutionary development in which the system is consciously planned to be delivered incrementally byrnsubsystem or feature sets. Furthermore, systems development methods based on the structured approach arernthe most popular and used most intensively in the IS departments. Rapid application development and in-houserndeveloped methods are also popular.