Moldable Development Patterns

TL;DR

This paper introduces moldable development, a technique that enhances software explainability by enabling customizable tools and domain models, supported by practical patterns from extensive real-world experience.

Contribution

It presents a set of mutually supporting patterns for implementing moldable development, based on several years of application in open-source and industrial systems.

Findings

Identified key patterns for moldable development

Demonstrated practical benefits in real-world systems

Provided guidance for diverse user groups

Abstract

Moldable development supports decision-making by making software systems explainable. This is done by making it cheap to add numerous custom tools to your software, turning it into a live, explorable domain model. Based on several years of experience of applying moldable development to both open-source and industrial systems, we have identified several mutually supporting patterns to explain how moldable development works in practice. This paper targets (i) readers curious to learn about moldable development, (ii) current users of the Glamorous Toolkit moldable IDE wanting to learn best practices, and (iii) developers interested in applying moldable development using other platforms and technology.