Since the beginning of computer science more than 50 years ago, software engineers have sought techniques resulting in higher levels of quality and productivity. Some of these efforts have concentrated in increasing the level of abstraction in programming languages (from assembler to structured languages to object-oriented languages). In the last few years, we have witnessed an increasing focus on development based on high-level, graphical models. They are used not only as a means to documentthe analysis and design activities, but also as the actual “implementation” of the application, as well as for automatic analysis, code, and test case generation. The notations used to describe the models can be standard and general purpose (for example, UML) or tightly customized for the application domain. Code generation for the full application is only accomplished for specific, well-understood application domains. A key initiative in this direction is OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), where models are progressively transformed until executable code is obtained. In this chapter, we give an overview of these technologies and propose ideas following this line (concerning metamodeling and the use of visual languages for the specification of model transformation, model simulation, analysis and code generation), and examine the impact of model-based techniques in the development process.
Selection and use of general-purpose programming languages
