Pragmatic model driven development. Part I. Code generation scenario’s

Note. This series of posts is also published as a Capgemini group white paper and published in Software Release Magazine (in Dutch, in two parts).

With the economy at a low point in time, organizations and project are clearly resetting their goals. Long term multimillion projects are being halted, in favor of short, agile projects, with feasible goals and good time-to-target. To realize these stringent goals, projects are striving for lower costs and higher productivity. On the one hand these goals might be reached by outsourcing, on the other hand standardization, industrialization and reuse could also contribute.

A long term promise in the field of increasing productivity and reuse is to handcraft less code, but to generate code from the project’s design or model. In general this is called model driven development

When is model driven development effective?

Although many alternative strategies exist towards model driven development, we feel that a pragmatic approach works best. The more theoretical an approach gets, the harder it is to apply it to projects. In this paper, we present such a highly pragmatic approach to model driven development. We model and standardize smart use cases and the domain model for a project, and generate code and other deliverables from these models using a straightforward tool set. This approach has proven to be very effective in many projects.

Model driven development can be effective when code and other deliverables can be generated rather than written or hand coded. Thus tedious repetitive work is avoided, such as creating web forms, user interface panels, domain objects, table create statements, service interfaces and even writing use case documentation. Developers can now focus on developing business logic, or tuning the user interface. We have witnessed very high productivity in projects that apply pragmatic model driven development. For example, a recent project (.Net) at a large Dutch government agency was realized in 20% of the time the customer estimated the project.

As it is also fairly easy to create new types of deliverables simply by investigating your existing code and derive template from this, we can save time and effort in many scenario’s and development environments. Model driven development has proven to be successful in (partly) generating solutions for various types of projects, including ASP.Net, Silverlight, SharePoint, Visual Basic Window Forms, Java, service oriented applications (.Net and SAP), and even back end functionality.

Moreover, as code generation is based on proven templates, generated code is of higher quality then hand written code. Thus, model driven development also contributes to lowering maintenance costs of delivered software. This effect is further increased because the documentation as presented in the model is directly traceable to the application’s code.

Last but not least, in model driven development, analysts and designer actively participate in delivering working software, as the models they help creating, are now directly converted into code. Model driven development is a collaborative scenario, where, especially in agile projects even end-users can participate directly in software development. To illustrate this, we usually model the smart use cases and the domain model that, underlie the software we produce, during interactive workshops with the end users, and generate working software either in these workshops, or shortly after.

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Code generation scenario’s

Generating code from a model can be done in a wide variety of scenario’s, and with a even wider range of goals and deliverables to strive for:

  • Proprietary techniques. Traditionally there’s tools such as Oracle Designer and Developer or Cool:GEN that host both the model as the coding environment. Using these environment high productivity can be achieved, because a lot of assumptions can be made on the target environment. In general such development environments deliver highly proprietary models and code.
  • DSL’s. Domain Specific Language (DSL) are textual or visual representations of custom domains, for which specific modeling language can be defined, think of web service definition or even a language for defining the mortgages or life assurance domain. With DSL’s again has the promise of high productivity, if and only if, the target environment can be clearly defined, for instance in the software architecture and framework that are used.
  • UML. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a set of techniques for modeling behavior and structure of applications. These standardized techniques, such as use case or class diagrams are used in projects around the world, however in different variations and dialects. Generating code or other deliverables from a UML model is highly possible, again if the target environment is well defined.
  • Database. With proper modeling techniques lacking, many tools take the approach of generating (parts of) applications from the database structure. Although this approach seems appealing and fast, there are limitations. The generated application will mimic the database, and thus will be very data-centric, instead of providing support for the work processes to be automated. Besides that, in the current era of service orientation and cloud computing, many application do not even have their own database.

2 thoughts on “Pragmatic model driven development. Part I. Code generation scenario’s

  1. Can you give more details about the code generation project for the large dutch government agency? More specifically which agency and what kind of project, because i would like to use that as an example for pushing code-generation at work.

  2. I am very sorry, but I can not comment on this. It is a rather large government agency that applies our agile Accelerated Delivery Platform for short running projects. Our platform includes this pragmatic model driven development approach.

    P.S. The whole white paper can be downloaded from the Capgemini website (somewhere). More information on our agile platform can be found at http://www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com; if you register, you will find that there’s a lot of interesting free downloads, including Tobago MDA, our code generation tool.

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