Modeling and Model Transformation as a Service: Towards an Agile Approach to Model-Driven Development

Scalability has always been a challenge in software development, and agile methods have faced their own ordeal in this regard. The classic solution is to use modeling to manage the complexities of the system while facilitating intrateam and inter-team communication; however, agile methods tend to shy away from modeling to avoid its adverse effect on productivity. Model-driven development (MDD) has shown great potential for automatic code generation, thereby enhancing productivity, but the agile community seems unconvinced that this gain in productivity justifies the extra effort required for modeling. The challenge that the MDD community faces today is to incorporate MDD in agile development methodologies in such a way that agility is tangibly and convincingly preserved. In this paper, we address this challenge by using a service-oriented approach to modeling and model transformation that pays special attention to abiding by agile values and principles.