Towards facilities to introduce solutions for MDE in development environments with reusable assets

Abstract

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software development paradigm that promotes improvements in productivity through reuse of software model specifications. Although much effort has been dedicated for more than ten years, MDE has not achieved expressive use. In this paper we address the problem of a lack of a knowledge base about MDE-based solutions, a reason that hampers MDE in practice. To surpass it we propose a domain specific language named RAS++ that represents these solutions as reusable assets. Assets are composed by reuse structures and semantics for the execution of technical solutions for Automated Software Engineering, fostering the integration of tasks for MDE in development environments. Facilities are introduced through some supporting tools: one to design reusable assets and other to integrate them in target development environments. Practical experiences have proven to be promising, suggesting that reusable assets promote some benefits not allowed by other approaches, such as the possibility of a distributed base of knowledge for ASE solutions.