Rethinking the Software Life Cycle: About the Interlace of Different Design and Development Activities

Software engineering research addresses professional ways of designing, developing and implementing software. So far, software engineering more or less takes for granted that software professionals have control over the material implementation of a piece of software. Though users might use the software innovatively or even customise it, neither end-user tailoring (EUT) nor end-user development (EUD) are treated systematically regarding the impact of deferring part of the design to the use context on software development technologies or processes. Especially the development, adaptation and configuration of software products, software that is used by more than one user in more than one organisation – makes visible that different parallel ongoing development activities often distributed over more than two organisations have to be coordinated.