The buzz at the Annual General Meeting of the SSADM User Group was the adoption of SSADM – Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method – as a British Standards Institute-approved standard. It is necessary that this move takes place prior to 1992, otherwise SSADM cannot be a choice for procurement within the European Community. However, a lot of users are reported to be worried about this move, fearing that it will slow down future development of the methodology and that pinhead procurement agents will insist that every minor clause of the standard is adhered to whether it be relevant to that particular software project or not. The User Group is advocating that the standard be used as a guideline and that projects should be judged by whether the end product fits the requirements – many vendors fear that they may lose contracts by offering the appropriate design rather than the most rigorously-standardised design. What is really at issue in the standard methods world at the moment is which will be the winners and losers as an international standard comes into being. It seems that there are three main contenders for world dominance: Yourdon, SSADM and Merise – respectively the most popular US, UK and French methods. One solution lies with the development of Euromethod, which is supposed to be adopting the best parts of various existing methods to create an understandable procurement model for use throughout Europe. SSADM users reckon the best way to proceed may be to integrate SSADM and Merise, which appear to have compatible strengths and weaknesses. However, they are worried by the fact that Paris-based Compagnie Generale d’Informatique SA now owns Yourdon. They fear that CGI will attempt to cobble together Merise and Yourdon to create an international standard, leaving SSADM out in the cold…
