CRISTAL: A practical study in designing systems to cope with change

•We propose a self-describing system to facilitate evolving system designs.•The model is tested in a data intensive environment which changes over time.•Description-driven modelling concepts are explained in detail.•Evolving requirements are handled over extended timescales in the model.•We examine the application of this self-describing system in practice.

Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a ‘description-driven’ approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes how handling descriptions of objects in practice alongside their instances (making the objects self-describing) can mediate the effects of evolving user requirements on system development. This paper reports on and draws lessons from the practical use of a description-driven system over time. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from adopting such a self-describing description-driven approach in future software development.