Chapter 5: Architects

Chapter 5

Architects

Customers have been telling Microsoft for some time that many of the CASE tools they bought in the 1980s and 1990s did not add sufficient value to the development process. Selling points of the tools failed to materialize, and even good products were swamped by over-promised technology.

If the models that the CASE tools supported did not reflect the code and other implementation artifacts, they quickly became irrelevant. If the models were used to generate code, they typically got out of sync after the developers added other code around the generated code. Even products that did a good job of “round tripping” the generated code eventually overwhelmed developers with the complexity of solving this problem. These problems were often exacerbated because CASE tools tried to operate at too high a level of abstraction relative to the implementation platform beneath. This forced them to generate large amounts of code, making it even harder to solve the problems caused by mixing hand-written and generated code.

Despite these issues, there is a belief among those involved in software development that somehow modeling can be applied to make our lives easier. Team System's vision is to change the way developers perceive the value of modeling: to shift their perception that modeling is a marginally useful activity that precedes real development to the recognition that modeling is an important mainstream development task, not an activity primarily focused on documentation. When models are regarded as first-class development artifacts, developers write less conventional code because more powerful application abstractions can be employed. Model-driven development is thus inherently more productive and agile. Moreover, others involved in development—from business analysts, architects, and designers to network staff and system management specialists—will perceive modeling as adding value to the tasks for which they are responsible. When models span development and run-time activities in this way, communication between people can be optimized and traceability can be enabled across the life cycle in any direction. We hold that making modeling mainstream in this way can ultimately change the economics of software development and ensure that software systems meet the needs of a business.

NOTE
This approach to model-driven development is part of an initiative at Microsoft called Software Factories.