Learning Pros and Cons of Model-Driven Development in a Practical Teaching Experience

Current teaching guides on Software Engineering degree focus mainly on teaching programming languages from the first courses. Conceptual modeling is a topic that is only taught in last courses, like master courses. At that point, many students do not see the usefulness of conceptual modeling and most of them have difficulty to reach the level of abstraction needed to work with them. In order to make the learning of conceptual modeling more attractive, we have conducted an experience where students compare a traditional development versus a development using conceptual models through a Model-Driven Development (MDD) method. This way, students can check on their own pros and cons of working with MDD in a practical environment. Comparison has been done in terms of Accuracy, Effort, Productivity and Satisfaction. The contribution of this paper is twofold: the description of the teaching methodology used throughout the whole course; and the presentation of results and discussions of the comparison between MDD and a traditional development method. Results show that Accuracy, Effort and Productivity are better for MDD when the problem to solve is not easy. These results are shown to students to promote a discussion in the classroom about the use of MDD. According to this discussion, the most difficult part of using MDD is the learnability and the best part is the automatic code generation.