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POWER TO THE USERS
Tips for building flexible applications
By Brent Hawthorne
As the pace of business and change increased through the '90s, the demand for faster delivery of applications also increased. In my company, we developers are often asked to deliver applications before the company really knows what they want the applications to do. Or we're asked to build basically the same application over and over again for different parts of our organization, making relatively minor changes each time.
I also often find that the needs the applications are designed to evolve over time, often in very minor ways, and the users want applications that will also change to keep pace. What I'll be discussing here are ways to save yourself and your users time and pain during the life of your applications by passing control for many of those application's behaviors back to the users themselves.
Developer issues
I've become a strong believer over the years in building my code and my applications to be as flexible as possible. The reasons are basically selfish -- I get really tired of having to go back into the code of a database every time something minor needs to be changed. I become particularly irritated when I'm asked to change the same thing more than once a week. I don't like the amount of time it sometimes takes me to locate the right place in an application to make a relatively minor change in code that I, or one of my team members, wrote months before and hasn't looked at since. Administrators can also get a little short when users call and want new employees to have permission to access certain things, but can't quite define what they need in terms of ACL (access control list) levels and roles.
The end result of using the techniques I'll be discussing here has been more flexible applications that make the users happier. We developers and administrators are happier, too, since those applications take less time and energy from us to keep rolling. We, in turn, live longer lives as a result of our ability to accept minor changes without development time. Users and management have also shown a tendency toward happiness. They're impressed with what great developers we are, when they ask for an application "Just like Joe's, but with these changes," and we tell them they can have a copy right away.
Oh, yes, by the way, you users can make most of the changes I'm talking about yourselves, without having to touch the design. Another big advantage for us developers has been that we can use the same basic designs, controlled by the use of design templates, for multiple applications that aren't exactly the same. That gives us a single place to change and update applications used by our company's various departments. And that I like.
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