An Agile Model-Based Software Engineering Approach Illustrated through the Development of a Health Technology System

Abstract

Model-Based Software Engineering (MBSE) is an architecture-based software development approach. Agile, on the other hand, is a light system development approach that originated in software development. To bring together the benefits of both approaches, this article proposes an integrated Agile MBSE approach that adopts a specific instance of the Agile approach (i.e., Scrum) in combination with a specific instance of an MBSE approach (i.e., Model-Based System Architecture Process—“MBSAP”) to create an Agile MBSE approach called the integrated Scrum Model-Based System Architecture Process (sMBSAP). The proposed approach was validated through a pilot study that developed a health technology system over one year, successfully producing the desired software product. This work focuses on determining whether the proposed sMBSAP approach can deliver the desired Product Increments with the support of an MBSE process. The interaction of the Product Development Team with the MBSE tool, the generation of the system model, and the delivery of the Product Increments were observed. The preliminary results showed that the proposed approach contributed to achieving the desired system development outcomes and, at the same time, generated complete system architecture artifacts that would not have been developed if Agile had been used alone. Therefore, the main contribution of this research lies in introducing a practical and operational method for merging Agile and MBSE. In parallel, the results suggest that sMBSAP is a middle ground that is more aligned with federal and state regulations, as it addresses the technical debt concerns. Future work will analyze the results of a quasi-experiment on this approach focused on measuring system development performance through common metrics.