Generalized systems: reducing high cost of application development

The lead author is a programmer-analyst for administrative systems and data processing at Princeton University . The coauthor is associate director of the same facility . A major improvement in the productivity of systems development requires a fundamental change in the process . We must give up writing programs for individual system need s and develop (or acquire) systems which address a whol e class of organizational needs . These are systems which ar e general in function, which require a set of parameters to govern their execution for a particular application an d which can continuously respond to changing system need s with little programming effort . These generalized systems will enable us to deal with two of the most persistent problems in data processing : the time and resources required to develop a unique application system and the high percentage of our programming resourc e spent upon system maintenance . With this approach, fewer programs will be written; the ones that are written will b e smaller functional modules, and the number of program s being maintained will be reduced as they are replaced b y the generalized systems . GEN ENTRY, the generalized system the authors developed at Princeton University, handles data entry, data editing and data base update in an interactive environment . The user enters data in response to queries issued by GENENTRY. The data is checked, invalid data is rejected an d