Within the 4th European workshop on ” From code centric to model centric software engineering: Practices, Implications and ROI” we had an interesting discussion. After a talk about the question, if or if not MDA is practically usable in industrial projects with positive experiences (Fieber, Regnat, & Rumpe), the discussion was about Return on Investment of MDA. The most interesting part of the discussion for me was that there was a complaint about the fact, that until today it was not possible to model behavior effectively. If it were possible to model behavior – as structures can be modeled with UML – then this would be the big thing missing. However the problem was considered to be very difficult, if not too difficult.

That was when I made my statement, knowing about my yearlong successful experiences in behavior modeling. I said that probably the domain chosen was too broad. In my opinion we should concentrate on a specific domain – business processes – and model the behavior of it. That is because to model, it is necessary to know and describe the laws of nature of the domain – in this example business processes – in advance. Then as a result the modeling method will be very effective and successful. I said that for example in BPMN 2.0 major steps forward have been made recently.

We believed that following this approach it will be possible to achieve much better ROI of MDA than in the past. Practically this will mean that it will be possible to provide an application wireframe within days and an application within weeks instead of month or years. Through this productivity boost Custom Software will be cheap to build – therefore companies do not have the choice between standard software or high cost, but they can have what they specifically need at a low price. This is not out of reach.

Reference

Fieber, F., Regnat, N., & Rumpe, B. Assessing usability of model driven development in industrial projects. In T. Bailey, R. Vogel, & J. Mansell (Hrsg.), 4th European Workshop on “From code centric to model centric software engineering: Practices, Implications and ROI” (S. 1-9). University of Twente, Enschede: Centre for Telematics and Information Technology.