Abstract
Using models as the primary source when creating systems and software is claimed to improve productivity but this is often hard to justify in practice. It requires a lot of resources and time to do it in “academic” way by building the same system twice, having parallel teams, many developers and covering large numbers of development tasks. Still, companies and their teams need some data for decision making. We describe, based on cases from practice, how evaluation can be conducted in a practical way. This allows repeating evaluations internally and to judge if a particular model-based development approach is suitable for the company. Briefly, the evaluation is based on the same approach that is the basis for daily business: Inspect how much effort was needed to implement an application or feature that met customer requirements. We give examples of this by describing evaluations done in different kind of companies: developing consumer electronics, automation systems, and web-based enterprise applications for the cloud. The companies report 5-10x increase in productivity. Among the cases discussed the key success factors have been able to produce the code and other artefacts largely automatically from the models and the use of internally developed domain-specific modeling languages giving full control to their users.
Biography
Juha-Pekka Tolvanen has been working on industry projects providing domain-specific modeling languages and supporting tools since the 90s. His work on this topic originally started via an academic research project (http://metaphor.it.jyu.fi/) but then quickly lead to founding MetaCase (www.metacase.com) together with his research colleagues. MetaCase provides tooling (MetaEdit+) along with support services, consulting and training.
In the last years, he had mostly acted as a consultant (Europe, Asia, and North America) for modeling language and generator development as well as for their introduction into real use – and benefits. In this role, he has worked on over 100 language engineering projects. He had have made about 90 publications on this subject and a PhD dissertation (http://users.jyu.fi/~jpt/doc/index.html). He still enjoys research work and acts as an adjunct professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (http://users.jyu.fi/~jpt/). If he’s not metamodeling, defining languages or generators, he prefers sailing or skiing depending on the season.
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