Business-IT-Link
Using industrial methods in the application development
Researchers:
David Brütsch, Alexander Verbeck, Karsten Schierholt, Prof. P. Schönsleben
Partners:
Credit Suisse, Application Development
Financed by:
Credit Suisse, Application Development
Objective:
Communication is based on an exchange of information. This is a problem in interdisciplinary teams, since often the meaning of language is interpreted differently by team members with different backgrounds. The team in this project includes people with a banking background and members of the software development departement. It is therefore necessary that information as the object of communication is represented and made available in a form which is accepted and used by all involved persons. Therefore the goal of this project deals with a documentation and communication concept for software development in an interdisciplinary team.
By standardizing information and knowledge about the information to be processed it is possible to evaluate information and select the parts that are beneficial for solving specific problems. All other information does not need to be delivered to the persons involved directly; it is sufficient to have this information available in a centralized way. Through the selection of relevant information the information flow management is improved. This again is a prerequisite for developing further knowledge about the information structure.
An Evaluation of Information is necessary to select information relevant to solve specific problems. An association of certain information structures with connected tasks is the basis for filtering the information relevant to each person. A Standardization of Information needs to be done in order to structure information. Also, Meta-Information is needed for accessing this structured information. Standardizing Information and notions requires clear definitions of these notions and interdependencies between them. One way of representing the structure would use a network of objects and define the connections through the interfaces between these objects. The network of objects must be capable of describing topics of verbal communication.
Activities in 1997:
- Development of a documentation concept for IT-processes for better visualization and communication
- Start up and coaching a ''Business-IT-Link'' team
- Literature survey for collecting information on the state-of-art in object-definition languages and associated areas