Mitigating Data Gathering Obstacles within an Agile Information Systems Development Environment

Obstacle detection and mitigation are key issues in systems development research. This paper reports progress on the detection and mitigation of data gathering obstacles within an agile information systems development environment. Key to this paper is the development of the trust obstacle mitigation model (TOMM) for use in this type of environment. The TOMM uses the concept of trust assumptions to derive obstacles and the concept of misuse cases to model the obstacles. A synthetic example, drawn from experience in the telecommunications industry, shows how the TOMM allows a development team to anticipate abnormal behavior with respect to the operational information system and to document a priori how this abnormal behavior should be mitigated. The TOMM is conceptually simple in deployment. It is shown why its use is well within the capacities of an agile information systems developer and crucially why it should not take up a significant amount of development time