A Systematic Analysis of the Effect of Task Clarity on Software Development Design
Werner Mellis · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2000
Two different types of development tasks are distinguished: Clear and unclear development tasks. Based on hypotheses from organizational theory two different designs of soft-ware development are derived. The transformational design is appropriate if the development task is clear. In case of an unclear development task software development should employ the adaptive design. The transformational design conforms to the explicit rec-ommendations and implicit assumptions of process oriented software quality management, a software management style considered by many authors to be the universally valid paradigm of software development. Because of the funda-mental differences between the two designs we conclude, that process oriented software quality management is not universally valid and should not be applied to unclear soft-ware development tasks.