Achievements, Failures, and the Future of Model-Based Software Engineering

Model-based software engineering (MBSE) is used in research and industry for quite a while. After three decades of improving modeling techniques, concepts, and explicit modeling languages as well as understanding the usability and failures of modeling in development projects, this chapter summarizes the principal obstacles, achievements, and failures of MBSE projects from a personal perspective. We consider the use of MBSE as a failure in a development project, if the methodology fails to meet its goals with respect to the particular project. For example, some reasons for failures are as follows: developers initially decide not to use models (negative cost/benefit analysis), decrease in productivity (increase in development time), or decrease in software quality (e.g., decrease in maintainability, understandability, or performance). On the contrary, the use of MBSE in a development project is an achievement, if it succeeds to accomplish all desired goals with respect to the particular project. Besides the aspects mentioned above, this could also be increased analyzability of the system under development due to the introduced high-level abstraction of models.