Do you use MDA/MDD/MDSD, any kind of model-driven

Question

Programming languages had several (r)evolutionary steps in their history. Some people argue that model-driven approaches will be The Next Big Thing. There are tools like openArchitectureWare, AndroMDA, Sculptor/Fornax Platform etc. that promise incredible productivity boosts. However, I made the experience that it is either rather easy in the beginning to get started but as well to get stuck at some point when you try something that was unanticipated or pretty hard to find enough information that tells you how to start your project because there may be a lot of things to consider.

I think an important insight to get anything out of model-driven something is to understand that the model is not necessarily a set of nice pictures or tree model or UML, but may as well be a textual description (e.g. a state machine, business rules etc.).

What do you think and what does your experience tell you? Is there a future for model-driven development (or whatever you may want to call it)?

Update: There does not seem to be a lot of interest in this topic. Please let me know, if you have any (good or bad) experience with model-driven approaches or why you think it's not interesting at all.

Answer 1

Model Driven development has been around for a very long time.

The most succesfull of the early attempts was James Martins Integrated Engineering Facility" which is still around and marketed by CA under the seriously uncool "Coolgen" brand name.

So why didnt it take over the world if it was so good?

Well these tools are good at making the simple stuff simpler, but, they dont make the hard stuff any easier, and in many cases make the hard stuff harder!

You can spend hours trying to persuade a graphic 4GL modeling language to "do the right thing" when you know that coding the right thing in Java/C/SQL or whatever would be trivial.

Answer 2

One of the problems of MDD is that, since it works on an higher abstraction level, it requires developers that can go up on the abstraction level too. That greatly reduces the universe of developers who can understand and use such methodologies.

Answer 3

Please let me know, if you have any (good or bad) experience with model-driven approaches or why you think it's not interesting at all.

I think the contributors here are part of the "No Silver Bullet" camp (I am definitely). If MDA worked (equals to "huge savings"), we would know it, that is for sure. The question is: how far "meta" can you go while keeping your system manageable? This was the turning point in UML 2.0 when they introduced a more formal meta-meta-model. So far, I haven't seen a real world usage of the modelisation power of UML 2.0 (but my world is rather limited). Besides, you have only two choices with a model-driven approach: generate code, or having a runtime exploiting your model. The ultimate constraint-free code generator is called "human", whereas the ultimate runtimes where found in the 4GLs (what is the current number nowadays?). Maybe that would explain the lack of enthousiasm.