Model-Driven Software Development: Technology, Engineering, Management

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 The Subject of the Book

This book is about Model-Driven Software Development, or ‘MDSD’. A less precise but common name for this discipline is Model Driven Development (MDD). Maybe you wonder why we decided to write such a book. We believe that Model-Driven Software Development is quite important, and will become even more so in the future. It is the natural continuation of programming as we know it today.

The application of models to software development is a long-standing tradition, and has become even more popular since the development of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Yet we are faced with ‘mere’ documentation, because the relationship between model and software implementation is only intentional but not formal. We call this flavor of model usage model-based when it is part of a development process. However, it poses two serious disadvantages: on one hand, software systems are not static and are liable to significant changes, particularly during the first phases of their lifecycle. The documentation therefore needs to be meticulously adapted, which can be a complex task – depending on how detailed it is – or it will become inconsistent. On the other hand, such models only indirectly foster progress, since it is the software developer’s interpretation that eventually leads to implemented code. These are the reasons why – quite understandably – many programmers consider models to be an overhead and see them as intermediate results at best.

Model-Driven ...