The increasing complexity of software systems is posing many challenges for software engineers. Document-driven approach to software development that has been a predominant approach in the past falls short to address these challenges. Although document-driven approach has been a bit successful, it fails to unambiguously capture the system requirements which leads to a system developed not meeting the customer expectations most of the time. The problem of requirements specification has been attempted to solve with formal approach to software development. Formal approach specifies the system precisely and unambiguously. The system specifications can be verified and validated automatically for correctness. It can produce executable code with tool support. However, formal languages such as Z, which mostly take their basis from mathematics, are inherently complicated to interpret and use by software engineers and customers of the software system. Thus, the approach does not find a better place in the software industry for widespread acceptance of it.

The emerging Model Driven Development (MDD) is an OMG (Object Management Group) initiative that provides an approach to system development based on model definition and transformations. Models are used throughout the software development life cycle for analysis, design, construction, deployment and maintenance. A model is a description of a system written in a powerful and expressive language. The language has a well-defined syntax and semantics, which is suitable for automated interpretation and manipulation. The OMG’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the most widely used standard for specifying and documenting a software system through several models. It is a visual and general purpose modeling language that can be applied to all the application domains and implementation platforms. Its extensive nature allows a software engineer to model software systems with all the major development methodologies. However, UML seems to be very popular where object-oriented methodology is used for software development.

Model-driven Development, software systems, software development, software industry, Model Driven Development, MDD, Object Management Group, OMG, software development life cycle for analysis, design, construction, deployment and maintenance, SDLC, Unified Modeling Language, UML, object-oriented methodology.