MDA Distilled: Principles of Model-Driven Architecture

Using Models

We build models to increase productivity, under the justified assumption that it's cheaper to manipulate the model than the real thing. Models then enable cheaper exploration and reasoning about some universe of discourse. One important application of models is to understand a real, abstract, or hypothetical problem domain that a computer system will reflect. This is done by abstraction, classification, and generalization of subject-matter entities into an appropriate set of classes and their behavior.

The subject matter may be far away from the implementation, such as the bank under study, or it may be relatively close to the implementation, such as a database. Similarly, the language we use to express the model may exhibit a high ...