ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the major approaches to systems development and implementation such as waterfall method, prototyping, rapid applications development, agile software development, joint applications development, end user development, the software acquisition capability maturity model (SA-CMM), types of system implementation, and systems maintenance. Public managers should pay particular attention to the selection of one or more of these approaches because quite often the situation or problem at hand will dictate which approach to use. Each of the approaches may apply to the development of new information systems consisting of hardware and software decisions, or to modifications of existing systems including hardware and software, or to just software acquisition or development by itself without reference to new hardware acquisitions. This distinction is important because many contemporary systems development improvements involve only additions to or modifications of software.
