Knowledge

As software development has become more complex and costly, model driven development is rapidly gaining popularity as an approach that makes dramatic improvements in software development quality, cost and time-to-market.

There are two major industry initiatives under way promoting model driven development. The first is the Object Management Group's(OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA), a set of guidelines for a modeling approach. The second is Microsoft's Software Factories initiative, which include model driven development as one of its four pillars.

To date, much of the hype around model driven development has focused on code generation -the ability to generate code from models and thus save significant manual programming time. In fact, model driven development in both MDA and Software Factories is a much broader concept:

MDA: "Today, MDA is being applied as an overall approach to gaining control over and systematically improving the entire life cycle of IT solutions - from modeling the overall business and capturing specific solutions requirements to developing, deploying, integrating, and managing many kinds of software components. Today's MDA is less about generating code per se and much more about precisely capturing requirements, enforcing architectural standards, maintaining traceability, and facilitating effective communication between the business and IT (and between different parts of IT)." Real-Life MDA: Solving Business Problems with Model Driven Architecture Michael Guttman and John Parodi, The MK/OMG Press, 2006

Software Factories: "Our vision is to change the way developers perceive the value of modeling. ... Moreover, others involved in development, from business analysts, architects, designers to network staff, and system management specialists, will perceive modeling as adding value to the tasks for which they are responsible. When models span development and run-time activities in this way, communication between people can be optimized, and traceability enabled across the life cycle in any direction. We hold that making modeling mainstream in this way can ultimately change the economics of software development and ensure software systems meet the needs of a business." Visual Studio 2005 Team System Modeling Strategy and FAQ, Microsoft Corporation, May 2005

These and similar initiatives have gained traction rapidly. Today there are a large number of practitioners, and a growing ecosystem of tools and technologies dedicated to model driven development.

Canonic's Model Driven Business^® builds on the best practices of the MDA and Software Factories approaches. Designed to be implemented with all software development methodologies and tools, Model Driven Business^® is a comprehensive and practical way of implementing model driven development that captures its full power and potential to transform the economics of software development for your company.