The Conceptual Model Is The Code. Why Not?

The selection of the paper entitled “OO-METHOD: An OO Software Production Environment Combining Conventional and Formal Methods” for this book on Advanced Information Systems Engineering allows us to reflect on the research context where the work was developed and presented (in “CAiSE 1997”) and to introduce its main contributions, how they have evolved with time and what influence the approach could have in the emergence of the Model-Driven Engineering domain. As the main goal was to provide a Software Process that should be fully Conceptual Model-based, the central message of this chapter is still the same 16 years later: the Conceptual Model must be the key software artefact of a sound, correct and complete Software Production Process. Novel approaches were required to generate a sound software production process, and they should use conceptual models as the key software artefact. The model should be the code of the application, and a conceptual modelling programming style should become a reality. While historically Software Engineering is in practice focused on programs, we have always tried to provide methods and tools to achieve the objective of make modelling the essential activity of programming. Why not making true the statement that “the model is the code?”. This was our point when we published our referred CAiSE paper, and it is still our position now, with many more results and experiences to support it, that we introduce throughout this work.