Developing obstacle tolerant information systems

Obstacle detection and mitigation are key issues in systems development research. This presentation reports progress on the detection and mitigation of obstacles within an agile information systems development environment. Key to this presentation is the development (and enhancement) of the Trust Obstacle Mitigation Model (TOMM). The TOMM uses the concept of trust assumptions to derive obstacles and the concept of misuse cases to model the obstacles. The TOMM allows a development team to anticipate abnormal and/or malicious behaviour with respect to the operational information system and to document a priori how this abnormal and/or malicious behaviour should be mitigated. The TOMM is conceptually simple in deployment. It is shown why its use is well within the capacities of an agile developer and crucially why it should not take up a significant amount of development time.