After years of heavyweight software process models there is a trend in industry towards agile methods for the development of business information systems. Experience shows that these approaches are promising, but there is still the demand for a lean and practicable, yet predictable approach for developing business information systems.

With our approach we present the essence of experience in the area of business information systems development, which has been enriched with current scientific trends and findings to finally provide a practicable and useful approach.

This approach, called No-Frills Software Engineering, is based on principles which address artifact quality and value orientation. These principles guide the socalled main activities during the actual software development. In this paper we motivate our approach and explain its core principles and main activities.