Keynote: Continuous Model Driven Engineering

Agility is a must, in particular for business applications. Complex systems and processes must be continuously updated in order to meet the ever changing market conditions. Continuous Model Driven Engineering is based on our eXtreme Model-Driven Design (XMDD) framework, which has been designed to continuously involve the customer/application expert throughout the whole systems´ life cycle including software maintenance and evolution. Conceptually it is based on the One Thing Approach (OTA), which combines the simplicity of the waterfall development paradigm with a maximum of agility. The key to OTA is to view the whole development process simply as a complex hierarchical and interactive decision process, where each stakeholder, including the application expert, is allowed to continuously place his/her decisions in term of constraints. Thus semantically, at any time, the state of the development or evolution process can simply be regarded as the current set of constraints, and each development or evolution step can be regarded simply as a transformation of this very constraint set. This approach, conceptually, allows one 1) to monitor globally and at any time the consistency of the development or evolution process simply via constraint checking, and 2) to impose a kind of decision hierarchy by mapping areas of competencies to roles of individuals, in order to identify required actions in case of constraint violation. The essence and power of this approach, which is technically supported by the jABC development and execution framework, will be illustrated along a number of real life application.