Driving Component-Based Software Development through Quality Modelling

With the advent of the OMG’s new Model Driven Architecture (MDA), and the growing uptake of the UML, the concept of model-driven development is receiving increasing attention. Many software organizations have identified the MDA as being of strategic importance to their businesses and many UML-tool vendors now market their tools as supporting model-driven development. However, most UML tools today support only a very limited concept of model driven development—the idea of first creating platform independent models and then mapping them into executable code. In contrast, true model-driven development implies that the development flow of a project is in some way “driven” (i.e. guided) by models. Quality attributes of models (e.g., measures derived from structural attributes) could be used in this regard, but although many different types of measures have been proposed (e.g. coupling, complexity, cohesion) they are not widely used in practice. This chapter discusses the issues involved in supporting this more general view of model driven development. It first presents some strategies for deriving useful quality-related information from UML models and then illustrates how this information can be use to optimize project effort and develop high-quality components. We pay special attention to how quality modelling based on structural properties can be integrated into the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.