An Exploratory Study of Forces and Frictions affecting Large-Scale Model-Driven Development

TL;DR

This study explores the organizational and technical forces influencing large-scale model-driven engineering, highlighting key friction points and contextual factors in a major automotive company's software development.

Contribution

It identifies four independent forces affecting model-driven development and discusses the impact of organizational context on technical challenges.

Findings

Contextual forces dominate cognitive issues in large organizations.

Key friction points include insufficient support for diffing and traceability.

Organizational factors influence technical challenges in model-driven engineering.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate model-driven engineering, reporting on an exploratory case-study conducted at a large automotive company. The study consisted of interviews with 20 engineers and managers working in different roles. We found that, in the context of a large organization, contextual forces dominate the cognitive issues of using model-driven technology. The four forces we identified that are likely independent of the particular abstractions chosen as the basis of software development are the need for diffing in software product lines, the needs for problem-specific languages and types, the need for live modeling in exploratory activities, and the need for point-to-point traceability between artifacts. We also identified triggers of accidental complexity, which we refer to as points of friction introduced by languages and tools. Examples of the friction points identified are insufficient support for model diffing, point-to-point traceability, and model changes at runtime.