Discussion Papers

This page has a collection of papers mainly on the subject of modelling in IT. To download these papers click on the boxes marked [pdf] or [MS Word]. The former are in Acrobat format and the later in Microsoft Word format. There is no registration or other attempt to garner your private details.

More information is also available in book-model form. A book-model is a combination of an electronic book and a computer model. A book-model called Designing IT Business Applications is available by clicking here. This covers much of the same ground as these papers but takes it further into the area of application development. It includes models for performance and recovery.

Modelling

• Context Modelling [pdf] [MS Word].

  This describes what context modelling is, why it is important and how to develop a context model. This paper describes the technique with a full worked out example.

• The Three Level Framework [pdf] [MS Word].

  This paper explains how context models, logical models, application architecture and technical architecture can be used together to define business operational systems. This paper is a follow on from the paper above on context modelling.

General

• Making IT Application Design an Engineering Discipline [pdf] [MS Word].

  This paper explains and justifies many of the ideas that underpin our view of how IT application development should be done. In particular it explains why modelling is a good idea and what characterises a good model.