
142 ◾ Design Science Research Methods and Patterns
of the extraordinary diculty of “full-scale” validation of a complex artifact, under-
standing that typically comes only from experience or long and close observation of
the design science research process.
In this case a “full-scale” test of the smart object paradigm as applied to a nuclear
reactor environment would have involved man-years of eort, broken out as fol-
lows: First a smart object interpreter or compiler would have needed to have been
constructed and tested; the eort for this process alone was known from experience
to be in on the order of man-years. Next, a full-scale control system ...