When Maintenance Becomes Use Experiences from two industrial cases of EUD
Yvonne Dittrich, Lars Lundberg, Olle Lindeberg · 2004
To change applications to fit the needs for users, for different places and for development over time has long been a challenge called software maintenance. In this chapter we take up tailoring as a means to make software flexible. Starting with two case studies - one taking up tailoring for different users and one addressing changes over time - the article discusses the problems with both use and development of a tailorable application. To develop tailorable software raise new challenges; how to make a user friendly tailoring interface, how to decide what should be tailorable and how to make a software architecture that permits this, how to make the tailorable system having an acceptable performance. Our experiences also show that the boarders between maintenance and use become vague since tailorability can replace maintenance by professional software engineers with tailoring by advanced users. Based on the experiences from our two cases, we identify and discuss five important issues when designing and implementing tailorable systems in industrial settings.