Towards a Framework for Building Theory from ISD Practices

The paper presents a framework for building theory from ISD practices. The framework locates ISD practices in a learning loop that is situated in a development context. The framework recognizes that ISD practices are related to their learned rationale that may come from previous experiences, i.e. observed impacts of practices, or from existing theory. These concepts recognized by the framework are needed for building theory from ISD practices, for designing research approaches for studying ISD, for evaluating existing research on ISD practices and for evaluating ISD methods. The framework is also used in the analysis of three recent studies on ISD practices and a discussion about the uses of the framework in research and in method development is included along with a set of possible research paths in the future.

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