What Model Driven Development can learn from Content Management Systems

I don't know what you do, but I am using a Content Management System (CMS) to manage this blog. I didn't type any HTML tag to produce this post. Lots of websites nowadays are managed using Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, or other CMS systems. Did you ever wonder why Content Management Systems are so successful and widespread?

The Process Centric vs. Information Centric approach to SOA

In one of my recent articles I stated: "it is questionable whether enterprises can actually maintain a focused strategy long enough to align their core business processes with IT". The point: software needs to become more flexible in order to adapt to the fast changing business environments of today’s enterprises.

To make software more flexible we need to move from an application-centric architecture to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Nice sentence… but what are the building blocks of such a SOA? Business process engines? Business rules engines? Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBA)?

In this article I want to analyze how we can create a SOA landscape truly aligned with the business processes it needs to support. How to model processes and how to create services implementing these processes?

Article highlights:

• A business process is user-centric.
• The process-centric approach to building SOAs delivers flexibility, but also has some serious disadvantages like state synchronization issues, ignoring resource transformations, and not enough focus on the system architecture perspective.
• The information centric approach to building SOAs is stateless, flexible, and mirrors the nature of organizations. The downside is complexity.

Blog overview 2009

It's the end of the year again. Like last year I want to give you quick overview of this year's content. But first I want to thank you for the useful discussions we had in the comments and on twitter. I hope you enjoyed reading my articles as much as I enjoyed writing them. I wish you all the best for 2010 and hope we can keep sharing knowledge!

15 reasons why you should start using Model Driven Development

I have written a lot about model driven software development approaches from different perspectives. For example from a domain specific language design perspective, an integrated modeling approach for SOA perspective, etc. I also have tried to give you a balanced view on MDD by talking about the things to know before starting with MDD and by discussing some potential dangers of MDD. You would say that if someone asked me for the advantages of Model-Driven Development I would just send him a link…

Unfortunately this is not the case. I can of course answer this question, and I mostly try to adapt my answer to the practical case at hand, but there is no clear overview (as far as I know) answering the question from a business owner: why should I start using MDD?

So, why MDD? What are the advantages of MDD, MDE, MDA or other model-driven related acronyms? In this article I will to try to answer this question by listing 15 advantages of Model-Driven Development. Note that some advantages depend on the type of model driven software development you use.

Article highlights:

• 15 clear advantages of Model Driven Software Development.
• In short: productivity, quality, alignment.

10 things you should know about Model Driven Development

Last saturday I gave a talk at the Devnology community day about Model Driven Development (MDD). I have talked about ten things you should know before you start with MDD. It was an introduction to MDD with some highlights of more advanced topics. In this article I share the slides of my presentation including a short explanation of each of the 10 points.

Architecture and Engineering in Business Engineering

It has struck me that many discussions about business-IT alignment and enabling the involvement of the business in software development still only talk about solution domain concepts: SOA, WOA, REST, web services, cloud computing, etc.

I think the question should not be what technology to use, but how we can create an IT landscape truly supporting the business part of an organization. This is not a trivial question; because it is questionable whether enterprises can actually maintain a focused strategy long enough to align their core business processes with IT. The current dynamic business environments do not give enterprises that time.

Article highlights

• We can create more business-IT alignment and agility by moving from software engineering to business engineering.
• Business engineering: software built by people who understand the business and who are able to express that knowledge in formal models.
• Necessary elements for business engineering: MDE with model execution and SOBA.
• Overview of a tool supporting business engineering.
• Future developments: integrating engineering models and architecture models.

An Enterprise Ontology based approach to Model-Driven Engineering

Today I successfully presented the results of my thesis at the Delft University of Technology. The goal of my research was:

Design an MDEE approach based on a sound theoretical foundation, providing end-to-end guidance to refine and transform an organization model into an IT system supporting that organization.

MDEE is the abbreviation of Model-Driven Enterprise Engineering, which is the name of the Model-Driven Engineering approach resulting from my research. On this blog I mostly call such an approach Model-Driven SOA. See for example my posts: SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA and A Framework for Model-Driven SOA.

In this article I want to give you a short overview of the results of my research. I have also added the slides of my presentation.

Modeling an organization using Enterprise Ontology

Business-IT alignment is hot, and that's not new. As regular readers know, my suggestion to attack the business-IT alignment problem is a model-driven approach. In a previous article I presented a framework for Model-Driven SOA in which we have seen that the starting point for a Model-Driven SOA approach is an organization model. While the organization model is the starting point of a model-driven process in which each model is as much as possible is automatically derived, it is important that this model is coherent, consistent, and concise.

In this article I want to explain the theory of Enterprise Ontology which describes a well-founded method to model the essence of an organization in a coherent, comprehensive, consistent, and concise way. The theory presented in this article is relatively new and differs quite a bit from existing organization modeling methods. I think Enterprise Ontology can offer advantages in understanding the essence of an organization and in using organization models as a starting point for building software supporting organizations.

From Process Design to Process Automation

Today I gave a talk at the BPM2009 conference in Garderen. A lot of talks were given, all centered around Business Process Management (BPM). Although a lot of people associate BPM with technical IT stuff, most of the talks were focused on process design, change management, emotions, and people. My talk, however, was a bit more technical as I focused on translating a process design into a Service-Oriented Business Application (SOBA) in a model-driven way. You can find the slides and a short overview below.

A metaphor for Model Driven Engineering

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article introducing a framework for Model-Driven SOA. This article doesn't stand on its own, it's based on earlier pieces on Model-Driven SOA and observations that Model-Driven Engineering should focus on the problem domain. However, I'm noticing that these articles can be hard to grasp if you have no background knowledge. That's why I want to explain Model-Driven Engineering using a simple metaphor I often use in my presentations.