Where Is the Proof? - A Review of Experiences from Applying MDE in Industry

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been promoted as a solution to handle the complexity of software development by raising the abstraction level and automating labor-intensive and error-prone tasks. However, few efforts have been made at collecting evidence to evaluate its benefits and limitations, which is the subject of this review. We searched several publication channels in the period 2000 to June 2007 for empirical studies on applying MDE in industry, which produced 25 papers for the review. Our findings include industry motivations for investigating MDE and the different domains it has been applied to. In most cases the maturity of third-party tool environments is still perceived as unsatisfactory for large-scale industrial adoption. We found reports of improvements in software quality and of both productivity gains and losses, but these reports were mainly from small-scale studies. There are a few reports on advantages of applying MDE in larger projects, however, more empirical studies and detailed data are needed to strengthen the evidence. We conclude that there is too little evidence to allow generalization of the results at this stage.