Multilevel modelling software development

Different from other engineering areas, the level of reuse in software engineering is very low. Also, developing large-scale applications which involve thousands of software elements such as classes and thousands of interactions among them is a complex and error-prone task. Industry currently lacks modelling practices and modelling tool support to tackle these issues. Model driven development (MDD) has emerged as an approach to diminishing software development complexity. We claim that models alone are not enough to tackle low reuse and complexity. Our contribution is a multilevel modelling development (MMD) framework whereby models are defined at different abstraction levels. A modelling level is constructed out by assembling software elements defined at the adjacent lower-level. MMD effectively diminish development complexity and facilitates large-scale reuse.