  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.
