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Technologies for Evolvable Software Products: The Conflict between Customizations and Evolution

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Advances in Software Engineering

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5316))

Abstract

A software product is software that is built for nobody in particular but is sold multiple times. A software product is typically highly customizable, or adaptable, to particular use contexts; moreover, such a software product can typically be thought of as a common kernel plus a number of customizations, one for each use context. A successful software product will be used for many years, and hence the kernel must evolve to accommodate changing demands and environments. The subject of this paper is the conflict between the customizations made for each use context and the evolution of the kernel over time. As a case study we consider Microsoft Dynamics AX and Dynamics NAV, highly customizable enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems, for which upgrades are traditionally costly. We study the challenges related to the customization/evolution conflict and present some software engineering approaches, programming language constructs and software tools that attempt to address these problems, and discuss whether they could be brought to bear on the conflict.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

    Peter Sestoft & Sebastien Vaucouleur

Authors
  1. Peter Sestoft
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  2. Sebastien Vaucouleur
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo, 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Egon Börger

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Antonio Cisternino

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Sestoft, P., Vaucouleur, S. (2008). Technologies for Evolvable Software Products: The Conflict between Customizations and Evolution. In: Börger, E., Cisternino, A. (eds) Advances in Software Engineering. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5316. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89762-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89762-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89761-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89762-0

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