Component Evolution Problem

The Component Evolution Problem can be stated as follows.

Assume you have a large software (100s of different user and admin web pages) application being developed by a team of developers. Since healthcare is one of the largest sources of such applications, we will assume the application is a healthcare product and call it Flexible Health Management Pro or FHMP for short. Assume that a separate group of developers has created a vertical integration for a very large health care company called Global Health United or GHU for short. We will assume that the extension is being delivered as a suite of components called the GHU Professional Package  or GHUP Package for short. Also assume another team of developers has created an integration with mobile phones that customizes the user interface to make it useable for phones. Assume that extension is bundled in a component called the Mobile Express. At the beginning FHMP, GHUP, and Mobile Express are all at version 1. Assume that each team of developers is independently producing a major new version of their software which we call V2. The result is FHMP V2, GHUP V2, and Mobile Express V2.

The problem is to deliver FHMP V2, GHUP V2, and Mobile Express V2 to Global Health United so that the upgrade process from version one is minimally painful and all the different pieces of software work well together. This is a difficult problem to solve and is rarely solved except in tightly controlled situations where the software has much simpler use cases.  The RDD approach to solving this problem is to push code into data tables and use overlay techniques to allow components to augment the behavior of the application. This would include the design and layout of the HTML of many of the pages as well.

A related problem is the Staging to Production Problem.