Systems-Thinking Heuristics for the Reconciliation of Methodologies for Design and Analysis for Information Systems Engineering

Abstract

Many competing, complementary, generic, or specific methodologies for design and analysis co-exist in the field of Information System Engineering. The idea of reconciling these methodologies and their underlying theories has crossed the minds of researchers many times. In this paper, we inquire into the nature of such reconciliation using the interpretivist research paradigm. This paradigm acknowledges the existence of diverse points of view as ways of seeing and experiencing the world through different contexts. We examine why it might be impossible to reconcile these methodologies that each represents a point of view. Instead of searching for the one (overarching, universal, global, ultimate) methodology that reconciles all others, we explain why we should think about reconciliation as an ongoing practice. We propose to the community a set of heuristics for this practice. The heuristics are a result of our experience in reconciling a number of methods that we created as part of our research during the past 20 years. We illustrate the use of the heuristics with an example of use cases and user stories. We believe these heuristics to be of interest to the Information Systems Engineering community.