10 Years Model-Driven -- What Did We Achieve?

Summary form only given. In July 2001, the Object Management Group (OMG) formally introduced the term "Model Driven Architecture" (MDA) with the objective to define "an approach to IT system specification that separates the specification of system functionality from the specification of the implementation of that functionality on a specific technology platform". This 10th anniversary is a good occasion to recapitulate what this decade since the introduction of MDA, platform-independent and platform-specific models (PIM and PSM) and transformations between them has bought us by providing us with Model-Driven Development as a new development paradigm. However, taking a closer look at the field of models and system development reveals that applying models with different levels of abstraction to the development of software-intensive systems has a much longer tradition, partly under similar names like Model-Based Development. Thus, while this idea has been around for quite a while, it is due to substantial improvements in the world of modeling languages and tool infrastructure have lead to a wide adoption of this paradigm since the introduction of Structured Analysis and Entity-Relationship Modeling. In this contribution, we show that a model-based development process has already become a de-facto standard -- most dominantly in domains outside the IT system domain envisaged by the OMG. Furthermore, we illustrate that the major contribution of model-based development processes is not the transition from PIMs to PSMs, but rather the provision of adequate -- as well as restrictive -- model of the problem-oriented application domain rather than the technical solution space including, analysis methods supporting a front-loading of quality assurance, and finally synthesis methods supporting an efficient design space exploration.