Experiences from Developing a Web Crawler Using a Model-Driven Development Tool: Emerging Opportunities

Model-driven development (MDD) tools aim to increase software development speed and decrease software time-to-market. AvailableMDDtools in themarket state that software development teams can fast and easily develop "any" software by using them. So, the following research question arises: what is the perception of a software developer in using anMDDtool to create software he/she is used to develop without models? We selected Mendix, a user-friendly and easy configurable MDD tool, to address such a question and develop a domain-specific software artifact. We propose a use case collaborating with a Swiss company that allows users to compare insurances based on web crawling. Therefore, we ask a software developer at the Swiss company to develop a simplified version of a web crawler using the selected MDD tool. The software developer has extensive experience with developing web crawlers. However, for the software developer using MDD tools was a new paradigm of software development. We observe that the software developer successfully developed the web crawler using the MDD tool. However, he/she perceived some difficulties during the development, arising opportunities such as decreasing modeling complexity, increasing the MDD tool integrability, and improving modeling assistance. Finally, we conclude the experience report by drawing next research endeavors to generalize the results and discover new opportunities for improving MDD tools.