Modeling Is Key to Software Success
Behavioral and structural views make for better code, claims evangelist Douglass
February 1, 2007 —
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Modeling an application is more than just creating a flow chart. Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a scheme in which fundamental concepts are abstracted away from incidental methods, for easier understanding and, hopefully, process improvement. As Telelogic chief evangelist Bruce Powel Douglass noted, “The key principle behind MDA is the separation of the essential characteristics from the things that change.”
Douglass, a former co-chair of Object Management Group’s Real-Time Analysis and Design Working Group and the author of several books on developing real-time systems using modeling techniques, has recently been espousing the benefits of C programming in a graphical way. Telelogic in early January released Modeler, a free, entry-level modeling environment that can be used to create embedded systems.
Douglass explained that “[models] improve your ability to visualize characteristics of your system. In 5 million lines of source code, where are your threads? Who creates them, who destroys them, where do they run, when do they run? What are the resources the threads share and how are they managed?”
The advantage, as Douglass put it, is that “I can visualize things better; I can more easily see what’s going on.” This doesn’t always make the customer happy, he conceded. “A lot of people have found that once they can see the architecture of the system, they say, ‘What was I thinking?’” Communication, consistency and provability are the obvious byproducts of a model-driven development culture, according to Douglass.
He likened the development of an application to the construction of a building, arguing, “I don’t have one picture with every detail of that building on it. I have blueprints that emphasize structural members; I have blueprints that emphasize water conduits, electrical management, heating management, different views that support different questions.” Class diagrams, sequence diagrams and state machines can be seen as analogous to the electrical, HVAC and plumbing diagrams of a physical structure.
“What we’ve done in [our] graphical C environment,” Douglass noted, “is we’ve identified eight functional, or operational, views. First is the use case diagram—that’s a way of representing requirements…and clustering requirements into usable, coherent units.
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