While many books have been published on object-oriented programming and design, little has been said about the overall development process. In parallel, evolutionary and participatory strategies have been discussed and used for years with variing success. We claim that combining object-oriented development with an evolutionary strategy which we call an application-oriented approach, will yield synergetic effects leading to a higher level of software quality, usability and system acceptance. This paper describes the various ingredients of our approach which are unified under a common leitmotif with matching design metaphors. A series of major industrial software projects serves as example and practical proof of the approach. We report about documents that have been produced and used within these projects and about the technical construction of the applications.