Concern-Driven Software Development

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With Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), software development is seen as a process of model production, refinement and integration. Models are built at different points or during different phases of the software development life cycle for different purposes using the most appropriate modelling formalism(s) at the most appropriate level(s) of abstraction for the task at hand, and model transformations are defined that establish relationships among these models. It has been shown that MDE can significantly lower the costs of software development. One of the main reasons why MDE is not widely used in practice is the lack of model reuse. Typically, models for a system under development are created from scratch, rather than reusing already existing models. This makes modelling often more cumbersome than coding, since most programming languages nowadays offer extensive libraries or frameworks facilitating code reuse. This research program proposes concern-driven software development (CCD) as the next generation MDE enabling large scale model reuse. Whereas classic MDE concentrates on models, the main element of focus in CCD is the concern, which encompasses a set of models at different levels of abstraction pertaining to a domain of interest to a software engineer. Concerns can have functional, non-functional, or even intentional characteristics (e.g., security), or pertain to specific solutions (e.g., communication protocols, design patterns). CCD builds on technology from the aspect-orientation, software product line engineering and reuse communities to package a set of models of a concern in such a way that they can easily be reused in an application-specific model. CCD has the potential to transform the software engineering discipline by allowing software engineers to become concern specialists and by enabling the creation of reusable concern model libraries. This will drastically reduce the modelling effort required to apply MDE in practice, and as a result make MDE a viable development choice for any company developing software, even in the context of rapidly evolving software development projects.