JAD Can Get Better

Interviewing and other conventional approaches failed to produce the user-devel­ oper understanding required to establish high-quality systems requirements for software development. .Joint Application Development (JAD) was introduced in the late 1970s, and has been widely used to alleviate this problem. But JAD s success has been critically dependent on the excellence of facilitation to deflect many of the relational problems that are typically experienced with the freely interacting group structure used to conduct JAD sessions. While the use of JAD is pervasive, excellent facilitators are scarce, which ham­ pers or even precludes some JAD efforts. In this article we recommend a solution to this problem—using the nominal group technique (NGT) in JAD sessions to reduce the impact of negative group dynamics on JAD results. We provide some indications of the potential effectiveness of this proposal.

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