Stepwise structuring: A style of life for flexible software
Erik J. Sandewall, Sture Hägglund, Christian Gustafsson, L. Jonesjö, Ola Strömfors · Managing Requirements Knowledge, International Workshop on · 1899
In a life cycle perspective on software, the paper describes a strategy for initialization and successive growth of software, which emphasizes flexible introduction and flexible use. The examples in the paper are taken from office information systems or personalized data processing systems.The key points in the paper are as follows:1. The system should be organized so that it allows multiple representations of the same information, particularly as images (bitmaps), text, and structured data.2. New applications should first be started by using representations with relatively little structure (such as images) and only gradually shift to using more structured representations.3. It is valuable for the end user to be able to control and make use of the gradual introduction of more structure.4. It is useful to have software tools that facilitate the interactive work of introducing more structure into the information. Some tools that have been implemented in this project are described.