Soft Systems Methodology for hard systems engineering - The case of information systems development at LIT/INPE/BRAZIL

Abstract

The Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was developed to deal with soft systems, systems in which the human components predominate. Any kind of software is a hard system, since technical factors predominate in it. But when the software is a component of an Information System its success depends heavily on soft aspects. This paper analyzes the potential contribution of SSM to Software Engineering in order to propose a method to support requirements elicitation for the development of Information System that helps to understand and consider the human, social and political factors that will influence the system success. A real situation of the Integration and Testing Laboratory (LIT) of INPE (Brazilian Institute for Space Research) was used to perform the study and to exemplify the use of the proposed method. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.