MDA Tool Components: a proposal for packaging know-how in model driven development

As the Model Driven Development (MDD) and Product Line Engineering (PLE) appear as major trends for reducing software development complexity and costs, an important missing stone becomes more visible: there is no standard and reusable assets for packaging the know-how and artifacts required when applying these approaches. To overcome this limit, we introduce in this paper the notion of MDA Tool Component, i.e., a packaging unit for encapsulating business know-how and required resources in order to support specific modeling activities on a certain kind of model. The aim of this work is to provide a standard way for representing this know-how packaging unit. This is done by introducing a two-layer MOF-compliant metamodel. Whilst the first layer focuses on the definition of the structure and contents of the MDA Tool Component, the second layer introduces a language independent way for describing its behavior. An OMG RFP (Request For Proposal) has been issued in order to standardize this approach.