The evolution of Information Systems a case study on document management

The paper describes a case study whose aim is to verify a set of hypotheses related to the management of documents during the evolution of Information Systems. The idea is to distinguish the evolution documents (documents that support the evolution of long living applications) from the development documents (related to a single development step of the application life). The evolution documents are derived from the development documents using a minimalist approach and a cost-benefit analysis. The study involved ninety applications of a large information system of a retail company. We describe the context and the method of the study. We present the results and discuss both validity and scope. The evolution documents are a collection of selected parts of the development documents with a size reduction (in pages) of an order of magnitude. The study identifies minimal sets of document types for classes of software applications. These sets are organized into patterns of evolution documents. All the evolution documents are stored into a common knowledge base managed through a wiki-based tool.