This book provides guidelines for practicing design science in the fields of information systems and software engineering research. A design process usually iterates over two activities: first designing an artifact that improves something for stakeholders and subsequently empirically investigating the performance of that artifact in its context. This -validation in context- is a key feature of the book - since an artifact is designed for a context, it should also be validated in this context.

The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses the fundamental nature of design...