End-User Development as Adaptive Maintenance

The change of change applications to suit the needs of users in different places and facilitate development over time has long been a major challenge for software maintenance experts. In this chapter we take up tailoring as a means of making software flexible. Starting with two case studies— one taking up tailoring for different users and the other addressing changes over time—the article discusses problems related to both the use and development of a tailorable application. Developing tailorable software presents new challenges: how do you create a user-friendly tailoring interface? How do you decide what should be tailorable, and how do you create a software architecture that permits this? How do you ensure that the tailorable system gives acceptable performance? Our experience shows that the borders between maintenance and use become blurred since tailorability can replace maintenance by professional software engineers by tailoring by advanced users. Using our experience of the two selected cases, we identify and discuss five important issues to consider when designing and implementing tailorable systems in industrial settings.