Assessing usability of model driven development in industrial projects

Abstract: An integral use of the model driven development paradigm influences and changes an organization's software development division rather heavily. Such a paradigm reduces some tasks in complexity and costs, but also introduces new tasks and, if introduced seriously, has severe affects on activities and roles in the software development process. As the model becomes the most important development artifact, there are new challenges to the development team, e. g. assessing the model's quality, model partitioning and configuration management for distributed teams, setup of build management, tool chaining and tracing of information through the various artifacts. Organizations coping with model driven development need to successfully introduce new tools and new ways of thinking, they are challenged in adopting their processes and training their staff. This paper presents an ongoing research project on the assessment of the usability of modeling and model driven development at a global industrial organization with its headquarters in Germany. The matter of interest is the analysis of the usability of modeling (especially with the UML) and model driven development by accomplishing an empirical, quantitative survey.