Improving the customizability of interfaces that communicate with different systems

Abstract

This thesis describes the process of handling the variability needs of a company which does not follow traditional product lines approaches and where the work of code maintenance is divided between the company and their customers. More specifically, this study focuses on improving the customizability of interfaces used for data transmission through different system, where misinterpretations can occur leading to problematic communication. The background specification, related work, tradeoff analysis of available methods, the development of a prototype and its evaluation are presented in this study. We document the guidelines for decision making and suggest ways for future work. We pushed the prototype on the company’s code repository, ready to be used by their employees and hopefully be proven useful. We hope that the findings of this study could support the customization endeavors of companies of similar technical contexts.