This is an example of a picture explosion. – Aaditsdf

The objective of any application development/delivery solution is simply productivity and quality: How can we deliver the most quality in a timely manner and at the lowest cost. However, when productivity is mentioned in the IT marketplace, it is often confused with just one of its components, application development productivity. Though the latter is very important (AOA claims to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in application development productivity), it is not itself the most important component to overall solution. This is because the initial development of an application is only a small percentage of the final costs of delivering that solution to a myriad of customers with varying needs across a variety of environments.

No, the key to that final productivity is reusability, the ability to effectively apply a complex application solution built for one envisioned set of needs in one environment to a large number of customers with a variety of needs in a variety of environments. Such reusability has been achieved with isolated subsets of application functionality, but is grossly missing across the very large application market, particularly for that area referred to as ERP systems. And at the heart of the difficulty, is the level at which software systems are built: They are built with low-level programming structures, far removed from the business problems for which they are intended to solve.

With current application development techniques used in building large systems, the major obstacles are the high costs and delays in modifying any standard solution to the needs of a specific customer and in porting changes made in one such system across a variety of other systems, each of which has been modified from the initial standard. Indeed, when looking at two systems modified from an initial standard built using traditional techniques, it is even difficult to fully understand how each differs from the initial system, and even more difficult to understand how they differ from each other.

Thus, any solution to the reusability problem has to include solutions to the modifiability and portability issues. However, it is the contention of this presentation that the problems with modifiability and portability are largely the result of the current practices used in transforming design level structures into programming structures for the implementation of a solution. As long as this transformation has to take place, there will be a chasm separating the high-level design thinking necessary to address the logical characteristics of an application system (i.e., the business problem) and the implementation work necessary to turn that thinking into an executing system (i.e., the programming solution).