16 September 2010

Do you use model based development?

I heard an interesting keynote speech from Jon Whittle this morning with the title The Truth About Model-Driven Development: Who's doing it, how and why?
He presented some findings on experiences from using model-based development in industry from the EA-MDE project. I talked to him afterwards and there apparently had only been one automotive company in the study, and I personally think that the conclusions might have been different if they were more data from them. If you are working model-based in your company and want to participate in the study you can do so by answering the questionare on the project web site.
One benefit of model-based development which I expected to see in the study was that it allows domain experts to actually do implementation, for example can chassis control experts actually do code for use in ECUs.
Note: You can substitue model-based development with several other acronyms and Jon's study is still relevant; MDD, MBSE, MDA, ...

I find this study to be similar to what Sascha Kirstan is working on in the automotive industry. I participated in Sascha's study this spring and just got a report with preliminary results, which I haven't had the time to read yet. I sure hope these two researcher will look at each others result and see if they can corroborate their findings or if they are contradictions.

Jon concluded his talk with the top ten tips for companies wanting to adopt model-based development and here they are (but to truly utilise them you must know a lot more about the context where they were found):
  1. Keep the domains (modelled, I assume) tight and narrow.
  2. Target well known domains.
  3. Put MDD on the critical path (he means that pilot projects never get sufficient attention and resources).
  4. MDD works best form the ground up.
  5. Be careful of gains that are offset elsewhere.
  6. Don't obsess about code generation.
  7. Not everyone can think abstractly.
  8. Most projects fail at scale-up
  9. Match tools and processes to the way people think, not the other way around
  10. Ok, there was only 9...

2 comments:

Muscle Cars said...

I don't know about Model Based Development.
I know about Component-Based Development (CBD).
The idea behind Component-based development (CBD) is to re-use existing (i.e. tested) code for certain parts of your application. The most important aspect you should undersatnd about CBD is that the component you are using can be replaced with another with little effort.

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