Model-Driven Development: Where Does the Code Come From? Insights Learned From a Case Study

Model-driven development (MDD) drastically changes the traditional view of software modeling, which no longer serves merely as documentation that will be put aside at a certain point during the development. Instead, MDD has made models an integral part of the development process. As a result, software designers and developers can focus on high-level problem solving instead of low-level implementation details. However, the current research focus is on model transformations and overlooks the importance of code generation, which includes the generation of infrastructural code (the static aspects of the system) and business code (the behavioral aspects of the system). In this paper, we first analyze the root cause about why existing MDD approaches are only good at generating the infrastructural code. Then, we propose a comprehensive approach that considers functional, dynamic, and object modeling. This approach is able to generate both infrastructural and business code. Finally, we present a case study to evaluate the proposed approach. Through this case study, we identify some insights on automated code generation in MDD. Our results demonstrate that it is not only likely, but also possible to fully automate the code generation process in MDD.