//Artefact:SoftwareBundle/com/sphenon/products/EMOS (5.1) - Working/Functioning

Overview

How does EM/OS work?
To understand the functioning of EM/OS, let's take a brief look at traditional software production and see what and where EM/OS is improving this:
Traditional software production
As illustrated in the diagram below, conventionally software is usually produced in this way:
  • 1. Domain experts describe the desired solutions in office documents, scratches, user stories, maybe visually in diagrams. These descriptions are colloquial, rarely formal, or in a systematic way.
  • 2. Software developers receive these descriptions. In agile projects only handlable parts are processed in an iterative style, in non-agile projects a larger amount might be specified and afterwards produced.
  • 3. By means of their technical knowledge, the developers translate these spefications manually into program code, with or without prior planning steps. Obviously, the produced code has to match the used technologies and gets tightly tied to them.
  • 4. Decisions concerning the used technologies need to be done in advance, once and forever for a given project, subsequent revisions are only possible at a more or less high cost.
There are many well known difficulties difficulties associated with this approach:
  • The knowledge about the systems is nowhere else but in the heads of the IT experts
  • Specification documents usually become obsolete soon, thereby the domain and the architectoral knowledge get lost
  • Manual programming is tedious, error-prone and creates delicate, costly lock-in-effects
  • Reversion of basic decisions requires costly renovations or reconstructions, like e.g. the introduction of some new technologies
  • And much more...
Software production with EM/OS
EM/OS addresses these difficulties in the following way, as illustrated below:
  • 1. The central part is a socalled lorescroll, comprising a description of your needs along with the relevant business knowledge.
  • 2. This lorescroll serves to EM/OS (the applicationloom) as a blueprint of your desired solution, it contains everything that is relevant from a business point of view.
  • 3. Based on the information in your scroll, EM/OS automatically creates precisely the required parts for your IT systems, resulting in professional software that exactly fits to your needs.
  • 4. New technologies, up-to-date technical knowhow and best practices of software crafting are being regularly provided by IT experts, basically without the necessity to modify your lorescroll, which essentially remains valid. This way, EM/OS already evolved for over 15 years.
Naturally these scenarious are a simplification for the purpose of contrasting the differences. The next section Working/Architecture provides a more detailed overview with references to the parts of the EM/OS production system.