An infrastructure for handling the administration of possible and mandatory input arguments at runtime for software program code. A user alterable argument descriptor file (ADF) stores all information related to input and output arguments for a software program and its constituent subpieces. During invocation of a software program, all command line flags and values are validated against the ADF, and valid pairs are stored in a key/value dictionary which is passed to the software program. Each subpiece of the software program may then access its needed arguments from the dictionary independently of other subpieces, thereby allowing modifications to subpieces which require new or changed arguments without the need to recompile the entire software program.