Test-driven modeling for model-driven development

A new software development process called test-driven modeling applies the Extreme Programming test-driven paradigm in a model-driven development environment. (The basis of this article is a project in Motorola´s iDEN division that is extending and migrating a large legacy telecommunication system to new platforms using TDM.) This process involves automatic testing through simulation and using executable models as living software system architecture documents. In TDM, we use the same message sequence charts (MSCs) for both system analysis (or design documents) and unit test cases. Similarly, we use the same high-level modeling diagrams for both automatic code generation and living software architecture documents to guide the system´s detailed implementation in later phases. Practical results show that developers can effectively apply TDM to large projects with high productivity and quality in terms of the number of code defects.