SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY USE IN SOUTH AFRICA

The objective of this study is to describe the development environment, the activities performed, and the use of systems development methodologies in IS departments in South Africa. Our results indicate that organisations in South Africa are developing systems in a multiple platform environment, supported by multiple operating systems, using both local and wide area networks. Multiple programming languages are used for the development of new systems and for the maintenance of legacy systems. The most popular programming languages used in South Africa are Visual Basic, Cobol, Oracle, C, C++, and RPG. PC-based environments and operating systems seem to be the most popular. IS departments of the responding organisations spend half of their time on maintenance, 31 % of their time on the development of new applications and 15 % on the customisation of packages. Focusing on the development of new applications, IS departments spend a third of their time on planning, analysis and design, another third on programming, and a third on testing, installation and evaluation. We defined systems development methodologies as a combination of systems development techniques, process models, methods and approaches. Systems development techniques are used most intensively during the requirements analysis phase and during maintenance. The phased process model, characterised by successiv