The Impact of Integrating Agile Software Development and Model-Driven Development: A Comparative Case Study

Agile and Model-Driven Development integration (Agile MDD) is of significant interest to researchers who want to leverage the best of both worlds. Currently, there is no clear evidence or proof for the real impact of such integration. As a first step in this direction, this paper reports an empirical investigation on the impact of integrating Agile and Model-Driven Development on the quality of software systems. To this end, we developed a financial application using Agile MDD, which is further contrasted with three other independent versions of the same application developed using different approaches: Agile method, MDD method, and traditional (manually-coded) method, respectively. We also compared the functionality of the systems and a variety of technical debt metrics measuring the quality of the code and its design. Based on the case study results, we have found that the use of Agile MDD shows some improvements in the product quality and efficiency.