Change Management
Change management is the mechanism that the application designer uses to control and tracks changes to the application.
The scope of changes that may be made to an adaptable application is totally different to that provided by conventional tools as with those a user may only make changes that were anticipated by the original designer and made provisions for them incorporated into the application.
In an adaptable application, there is no limit to how or what may be changed or what additional features may be added. This gives great potential power to the user but obviously, there can be situations where it is important for the designer or owner of the application to have control over and visibility of changes.
To cater for a wide variety of circumstances and requirements the designer needs to be able to specify what features of the design each type of user may view and may change. Any local changes made are able to be reviewed by the designer who can then choose to distribute the changes to other users as required.
The Adapt supports a hierarchy of users which can, for example, mirror the departmental structure of an organisation. In such a case a manager may be allowed the right to make certain types of changes and may then pass on those rights (or a subset of them) to lower-level users.
As each Adapt application has Total Design Knowledge the designer is able to have a high level of control over the ability of others to view the details of the design and to make changes. The ability to allow specified users to view and/or modify the definition of some dAtas gives the designer both control and flexibility over the protection of their work and allows for the integration of changes from different sources.
Some examples of the different permission levels that may be granted to a user are to be allowed to:
simply use the application but not view or change any of the design;
view some dAta definitions but not change them; this can help the user to understand the design and operation of the application but can also enable the designer to hide specific details such as a key algorithm;
change the definition of certain dAtas such as dAta images to customise the user interface to better match their needs without changing the fundamental operation of the application. Some types of changes that may typically be made are:
to simplify the structure of menus to reflect the fact that there may be features that the user does not need or only uses rarely;
to change the terminology used in images to be more meaningful to a specific user group;
to switch to a different language as default for the images;
to edit or add additional help prompts that make more sense in a particular environment;
to change the style or to reorganise the layout of images to work better on a specific device.
modify the content of some dAtas; i.e. add or remove dAta items to cater for cases that are specific to that user group. Such changes may need corresponding modifications to relevant images and logics;
change the logical operation of the application to alter its functionality in some way;
take a copy of the whole application to form an initial starting point for the user's own design.
Adapt keeps track of the changes made by a user and has to ensure that they can be integrated with any subsequently distributed by the designer. In many cases, Total Design Knowledge makes it possible for this to be done completely automatically but where changes have been made to the same dAta they may need to be reviewed manually.