Agile Design Science Research

Re-Visiting IS Design Science Artifacts: Making a Case for Critical Realism

“…By designing the problem beforehand and then performing evaluations that match the initial problem understanding, knowledge is reduced to recipes rather than meals and ingredients. To avoid focusing only on problemsolving [13] suggests an agile design science methodology but does not include retrospectives that can be considered a very important part of any agile methodology to continuously, and after each project, get feedback, and learn from the experiences of different participants.…”

“…Thereby the most common evaluation type is a means-end-oriented evaluation [37], mostly interested in how effectively the artifact helps achieve the given goals or ends [37]. This is also the type suggested by [1], [2] and also [11], [13], [17] who state that the outcome of the DSR evaluation is a measure of how well the artifact solves the defined problem. The means-end-oriented types of DSR also have a epistemological standpoint of positivism [3] in common, although both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are allowed to evaluate the utility of the artifact.…”

“…Support for the argumentation is found in [3], who state that current evaluation methods in DSR, including [1], [2], [16], [35], can lead to limited perspectives and misleading ex-ante and ex-post evaluations of potential and real impacts of designed artifacts. Furthermore, [13] argues that innovation potential can be lost when the focus is only on problem-solving of pre-specified problems in DSR. It seems obvious that the process of knowing through making can be hindered by the need to prove the utility of the result, i.e.…”

“…DSR is thereby regarded as relying on an iterative process that contains three main parts: defining or finding a problem to solve, designing an IT/IS artifact that solve the problem, and evaluation to prove that the artifact did in fact improve status quo (e.g. [7], [1], [2], [11], [13], [17]). The evaluation should be judged by the utility of the artifact [1], [2].…”

“…[1], [2]. (ii) Retrospective evaluation can extend and be used in parallel to any of the existing DSR methodologies such as [1], [2], [11]- [13]. (iii) It encourages putting more focus on evaluation of DSR research projects as a stand-alone research endeavor and argues that valuable knowledge can be gained regardless of the success or non-success of a DSR project.…”