The Archipelagian Approach to DSS prototyping

The Archipelagian Approach, a proposed methodology for designing and implementing Decision Support Systems (DSS), attempts to integrate modular design and adaptive design. The approach is based on decomposing the proposed system's tasks into structured and nonstructured modules, evaluating the difficulty of implementing each module, and utilizing the estimated difficulty and the priority of each module to determine the best development sequence. The feasibility of making reliable and accurate predictions of implementation difficulty, a key requisite, was previously not verified. The study concludes that five of the eight factors considered exhibit sufficient reliability and validity as predictors to confirm the viability of the approach.