Software modeling finds new support on business side
May 1, 2009 —
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Model-driven development is touted by experts as a best practice for creating software that best executes on an organization’s strategies. Developers, by contrast, don’t like model-driven development. Why the disconnect?
“It’s really complicated, and not everyone has the desire or time to learn it,” said Mike Munger, senior manager of component technology development at InfoPrint, a joint venture between IBM’s printing systems division and hardware manufacturer Ricoh. “And the tools are very expensive.”
That’s one cause, but it’s not the whole story, of course. There are deeper issues at work here. Meanwhile, new avenues are emerging into organizations that are discovering the benefits of modeling for service-oriented architectures, business processes and—paradoxically—agile practices.
Munger explained that much of InfoPrint’s development time is spent maintaining and updating IBM’s legacy code, adding that he believes developers in organizations everywhere are spending more time on this type of work than on kicking off new development projects. As such, he said, “there’s no real point” in doing UML modeling, where code can be generated from the model. “I’ve only seen that once, and it worked fine, but they still had to fill in [the code].”
According to Munger, modeling “is really good for getting all the players to understand their roles and what data they will be getting and passing around. The model ties it all together on one piece of paper.” He said his group uses data flows, state diagrams and hierarchies, but then put that aside and code by hand. “We use a lot of the same principles and practices [as UML], but in a graphics drawing program.”
Where new development is concerned, Munger said modeling’s value “is undisputed.” And, where existing products are being combined (as would happen after a merger), or if significantly large extensions were being written to existing applications, he called modeling important. “We just don’t have the big, overarching projects,” he said.
Munger’s point that UML’s inherent complexity limits its use to what he called “a small handful of people” was echoed by Dan Hebda, vice president of technology at Mega International, a company that sells modeling software.
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