Some critics have said that the utilization of structured methods, as like SSADM, raises both delivery time and bureaucracy. Do you imagine these criticisms are justified and what are the claimed benefits into the use of structured methods?

This is true that structured methods needs more work to be completed ‘up front’ into a project, during the design and analysis stages. The formality and rigour which their techniques impose needs analysts to get down to extra detail than frequently happened by using ‘traditional’ processes. The upside of that, obviously, is that there is greater lucidity about what the user want that should (1) decrease the actual work of system construction, as programmers do not have to on going back to the users along with questions and (2) effects in a system which better meets the users' real requirements.

An extra advantage of the depth and quality of documentation which results by a structured approach is that this is easier to keep and improve the system once delivered. Keep always in mind that most of the costs of an information system are acquire after initial delivery, it can be of considerable advantage.

Conversely, this has to be admitted that, even if these advantages sound plausible, here is an unfortunate lack of hard confirmation to prove which they have been realised into practice. To a huge extent, the benefits of the structured approach are merely apparent to people who have worked within the IS field for a moment, particularly those involved into maintenance and support.

Nevertheless, structured methods are open to the charge of bureaucracy. Since everything is documented very methodically, projects by using structured methods can end up accumulating a huge amount of paperwork. That, in turn, can prove very complicated to control and lead to the project team spending much time in document management in place of in actual analysis or development. The answer to this, obviously, is to determine or perhaps create, by using one of the readily-accessible database products, that an appropriate CASE (computer-aided software engineering) element.