Rulemakers and toolmakers: adaptive object-models as an agile division of labor

Abstract

Agile practices liberate us from the straightjackets of top-down design. But, the ease with which requirements can change encou-rages users to overwhelm us with requests for features. The result: Featuritis, which promotes hasty construction of poorly designed software to support those features. The design of an expressive domain model might get lost in the rush to write working code. Adaptive Object-Models support changeable domain modules by casting business rules as interpreted data and representing objects, properties and relationships in external declarations. Now users can change the system domain models themselves as their busi-ness dictates without having to deal with programmers at all. It's the ultimate in agility!