Abstract
A high percentage of information system projects still fails due to poor implementation of requirements. Over the years, investigations by numerous scientists suggest that architecture principles are important in the successful implementation of those information systems requirements. However, these investigations are of a theoretical nature; until now, no validation in practice has taken place. Our research stresses this empirical validation: do architecture principles work in real-life situations? To find this evidence, we need an instrument to measure architecture principles, in order to establish the connection between principle and project success. The focus of this paper is such an architecture principle measurement instrument. We describe the results of a literature study, yielding both the definition and the characteristics of the architecture principle. Besides the measurement instrument, we describe the related measurement method, including the test in a real-life case. Based on the outcome of the case study, we extend the instrument with additional architecture principles characteristics and attributes, and we improve the measurement method.
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Notes
- 1.
An information system is an system to collect, process, store, and distribute information and includes software, hardware, data, people, and procedures.
- 2.
Definition is an exact statement of the meaning of a subject and description is a listing of all characteristics of a subject [46].
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the senior experts Saco Bekius (DTA, now M&I Partners), Martin van den Berg (Dutch Central Bank), Danny Greefhorst (ArchiXL), Paul Oude Luttighuis (Le Blanc Advies) and Raymond Slot (Hogeschool Utrecht) for reviewing (parts of) this paper.
We would like to thank Yvette Hoekstra and Henk van den Berg for participating in the research team of the case study and giving all kinds of comments on both the measurement instrument and the case study results. Secondly, we want to thank the Dutch Tax Agency, and Jelco Bosma specifically, for enabling the case study.
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Borgers, M., Harmsen, F. (2020). An Architecture Principle Measurement Instrument Tested in Real-Life. In: Filipe, J., Śmiałek, M., Brodsky, A., Hammoudi, S. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40783-4_26
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