Case study on a process of industrial MDA realization: determinants of effectiveness

Abstract

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative gains a considerable and growing amount of interest in both academia and industry with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) placed in the center of MDA. A successful MDA realization in industry is determined by certain factors. In this paper, we identify key factors for the efficient accomplishment of the MDA by means of an industrial case study. The case study is performed in a context of a large IT company with distributed development units developing complex systems. The factors identified are grouped into two categories - associated with usage and development of an MDA-based framework. The factors stem from different activities performed during the process of MDA realization. We studied the process of MDA realization at the company and we discuss the factors in the context of the process. In addition to the identified process and factors, there was a need to investigate the importance of different elements in the process and assess their perception in the team. The results of a prioritization experiment performed in the course of the study show that language customization plays a central role in MDA even though the customization was initially perceived as a background activity by framework constructors.