Model-Driven Software Development: Technology, Engineering, Management

Foreword

by Krzysztof Czarnecki

Modeling is a key tool in engineering. Engineers routinely create models when analyzing and designing complex systems. Models are abstractions of a system and its environment. They allow engineers to address their concerns about the system effectively, such as answering particular questions or devising required design changes. Every model is created for a purpose. A particular model may be appropriate for answering a specific class of questions, where the answers to those questions will be the same for the model as for the actual system, but it may not be appropriate for answering another class of questions. Models are also cheaper to build than the real system. For example, civil engineers create static and dynamic structural models of bridges to check structural safety, since modeling is certainly cheaper and more effective than building real bridges to see under what scenarios they will collapse.

Models are not new in software development. Over the past few decades, the software industry has seen numerous analysis and design methods, each with its own modeling approaches and notations. More recently, we have witnessed the remarkable progress of Unified Modeling Language (UML), which now has a larger market penetration than any single previous modeling notation. Still, analysis and design models rarely enjoy the same status as code. The reality of most software projects is that models are not kept up-to-date with the code, and therefore they become ...