Parameter Block

The development of complex software relies -among other thingson well defined interfaces or APIs between the different modules. Unfortunately, as development cycles tend to shorten, the need for greater parallelism of development activities makes it more difficult to have well established APIs, since everything is under construction. This uncertainty introduces a coordination problem for the development team due to continuous corrections and adaptations required to accommodate the updated interfaces and as such, it is costly and error prone. A similar problem occurs when software introduces a plug-in architecture as a mechanism to allow future extensions. In this scenario, it is difficult to determine beforehand the information needs for every possible plug-in. Furthermore, as the number of possible relevant information for the plug-in can be arbitrarily high, it may be not practical to pass all possible parameters. Besides, sometimes it might be necessary that the arguments could be added or removed later, at runtime, in order to avoid cluttering the initial declaration with unused information or allowing expanding the passed parameters list. We could use something like the C++ open argument list, like: