Model Driven Software Development
Abstract
In recent decades, information technology has supported industrialization in many industries and with it significantly contributed to increases in productivity. The time of manufacture also expires in software development. A high degree of standardization and automation has now arrived. That is the condition to optimally support your business processes through the IT-environment.
itemis AG, as a global technology leader in the field of model-based software development, accompanies the industrialization process of your company.
Challenges
In many industries, companies face the task of consolidating their IT-systems in the years ahead. Since only an IT-environment can adapt flexibly and promptly to changing business processes and can react quickly to technical innovations, dynamic market development and increasing competition. The industrialized production of software leads to a significant improvement in quality and a higher rate of development – and thereby ultimately to an optimization of business processes.
Software Production Line
The most important pillars in the industrialization of software development are the standardization and automation. The guarantee for the compliance of standards and automation is a model-based generative approach – from the technical requirements acceptance to the executable program code.
The software generation based on models disciplines the development process, because they “enforce” the compliance of company-wide valid programming guidelines and standards. An uncontrolled growth of different frameworks, programming models and languages is thereby impossible. Furthermore, this method disassociates the subject-matter knowledge (models) from the technology (generators) and so makes the complexity of the task controllable.
DSL (Domain Specific Language)
DSLs are formal, self-defined languages specially tailored to domain with which models are created. A DSL can be shown graphically or textually and enables easy comprehension and formal specification.
The modeling takes place with a specially tailored domain languages, the Domain Specific Languages. These domain-specific languages are an excellent platform for the communication between IT-employees and/or requirements analysts and the domain experts because they also enable technical expressions and confine the degrees of freedom of the modeling languages to a necessary measure.
The communication gap is significantly reduced: Because with DSLs, the IT and specialist departments finally speak the same language!
The domain-specific models can be transformed by means of custom-made generators automated into executable software code for any target platforms. The generators can be adapted flexibly and completely in contrast to the early CASE-approaches. With domain-specific modeling languages and generators comes an individual software production line into being with which you can cover complete product lines. The production lines can be designed for every domain. Together they form your individual, company-wide software factory.
Model-Based Software Development with itemis
itemis AG identifies the industrialization needs of your company by means of a survey of the IT-system and application environment (e.g. IT-development plan) – and accompanies your IT-industrialization process. With our know-how in the field of model-based software development, we support you with the development of a software production line, which is individually tailored to the requirements of your company.
The benefits at a glance
- Automation and standardization
- Reuse of models and generators
- Separation of professional and technical aspects
- Full consistency between code, documentation, tests and configuration
- Very early identification of errors already at model level
MDSD-Potential Analysis
Easy access to model-based software development – itemis makes it possible!
In the workshop “MDSD-Potential Analysis”, we show you on-site the best way of introducing automated development processes. With this, you can examine which requirements are given in your IT-landscape for the introduction of model-based methods, without any great financial expense.