Software design issues: a very large information systems perspective

Abstract

Research in software engineering is concerned with the enhancement and automation of the processes of building computer application systems. While there is a broad consensus on the problems associated with software development, a specific understanding of the software engineering problem and the appropriate solutions are inevitably driven by the target application domain. Much of the current software engineering research is driven by the development of large scale embedded software systems. Our understanding of the problems is based on a different domain: that of very large information systems (VLIS). In this paper, we identify some significant software engineering problems from the context of developing very large information systems.