The MDArte experience: OrgAnizational aspects acquired from a successful partnership between government and academia using model-driven development

Developing and evolving critical information systems in order to cope with changes in regulations and laws is a constant worry for governments in the e-Government era. Due to the frequent challenges and some previous frustrating experiences, the Brazilian Government has searched for an alternative development method that could better fit its needs. At the same time, Brazilian Academia, represented in this case by the Computer Science Department of COPPE/UFRJ, has been researching how to bridge the gaps in order to harness the promise of Model-Driven Architecture in real life projects. A successful partnership between both started in 2005, which gave birth to a complete MDA development environment that would later be known as MDArte. The MDArte framework has been freely available since 2009 through the SPB portal (Brazilian Public Software Portal - www.softwarepublico.gov.br) and throughout its construction and evolution more than a dozen real projects have been built and maintained. During the development of such real life projects a lot of critical organizational aspects raised. The main contribution of this paper is to reveal and motivate the discussion on such organizational aspects that must be faced when deciding to adopt an MDA approach. In order to contextualize our perceptions, we present the MDArte experience, including its origin, evolution and current state. The major challenging and complex systems that have been developed with MDArte are presented as success cases along with an analysis of the benefits of using a Model Driven Development (MDD) approach.