PRINCIPLES FOR COMPUTER-AIDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT.

Abstract

This dissertation describes partial requirements for the Plexsys Development Environment (DE) for developing and implementing Management Information Systems (MIS). A DE is a complete and unified set of concepts, techniques, and tools (methods) that aid in normative requirements analysis, elicitation and ideation of unique requirements, modeling, analyzing, and performing design transforms. A framework is proposed as an aid for evaluating existing MIS analysis and design methods, and for developing a complete DE. A MIS produces decision support information and performs the transaction processing task. Part of this dissertation is to formalize the analysis and modeling of transaction processing. As part of this process, a modeling language and processing requirements are proposed. A design transform is proposed that develops logical system requirements given a set of decision support and transaction processing information requirements. This transform uses a formalization of the output decomposition process. In order to automate the transform, functional data types are defined. Further, constant data processing requirements are defined. Using the Plexsys software base as a model, the concept of the Enterprise Software Development Library (ESDL) is proposed. This library contains software tools specifically for the extension of programming languages for the business data processing environment.