An assessment of alternative application development approaches

Abstract The purpose of this study was to determine what development approach would be selected by MIS managers to develop applications with various characteristics. Managers of information systems representing St. Louis based organizations were asked to select from three development approaches, including traditional, user-development, and microcomputer development. The findings showed that these MIS professionals had concrete ideas on what development approach was most appropriate. When the number of users and number of workstations were four or more, respondents felt that traditional development would be used. Where data security, system audit, data recovery, and data retention requirements were necessary, traditional development was also preferred. User and microcomputer development were most likely in cases where on-demand, unstructured reports were needed and where systems were departmental or personal in scope.