institut f¨ur informatik - PST Thesis Management Interface - LMU

2. State of the Art
This chapter gives an overview of the general software development principles, technologies
and events that are relevant for this thesis.
2.1. Model-Driven Software Development
Model-driven software development gives answers to the issue of managing software of constantly
increasing complexity. This section discusses the events that lead to such complexity
and explains the background and principles of the model-driven solution.
2.1.1. Growing complexity of software
Current advancements in hardware and network technologies have led off to development of
ubiquitous, collaborative software systems that became indispensable for the modern society.
Software in these systems is often deployed in distributed and embedded environments that
consist of various devices (from personal computers and mobile devices to specialized sensors
and electronic control units), while communicating through diverse interaction paradigms
[FR07]. The complexity of such software systems and the expectations of quality are increasing,
while the software development cycles are becoming shorter. Such events cause
software developers to face major challenges in all stages of the software life cycle [HT06].
However, a considerable factor that influences the complexity of developing such systems is
not technical: it is the understanding of the problem domain - the area of interest to which
the end-user is applying the software system - and the gap between the problem domain and
the implementation of the problem solution [Eva03]. This gap appears when a developer
creates software solutions by using abstractions that are at a lower level than those used to
express the problem. When developing a system, the attempt to overcome this gap by using
methods that rely on human effort will only increase the system’s complexity [FR07]. Tackling
this issue thus requires a technology that will effectively raise the level of abstraction
in which the solution is implemented, which in turn will result in improved productivity,
efficiency and software quality.
2.1.2. Abstraction in computing
The history of computing can be observed as a study of layers of abstraction [Lid10, HT06]:
from hard-wired computers to stored-program machines in the early days, programming has
evolved from machine code to assembly languages and from there to third-generation languages.
The third-generation languages enabled developers to ignore register allocation and
low-level machine instructions by introducing high-level abstractions such as named variables
and structured programming constructs. The translation back to machine code could be left
to compilation technologies. Object-oriented languages introduced additional abstractions
3