Model-driven architecture and it impact on the software development process

The idea of model-driven software development is not new. It has been practiced in certain development fields for several years (e.g. data modeling). The trials to spread the idea to other fields of software development have been quite unsuccessful and never widely used in practice (e.g. CASE). Based on the gained experience, the architecture for model-driven development of software systems, i.e. model-driven architecture (MDA), has been developed under the umbrella of the Object management group (OMG). MDA offers a theoretical basis that enables the development of software on a higher abstraction level. Its use also affects the software development process; on one hand, analysis and design become the most important parts of the development and on the other, implementation and testing turn to be less important. The first section of the paper briefly presents the basic concepts of MDA. The second section describes the impact of model-driven development and MDA on a software development process and especially focuses on a comparison between mode driven development and agile processes.