MDA Distilled: Principles of Model-Driven Architecture

Why Executable Models?

Java, Smalltalk, and C++ are at a higher level of abstraction than assembler, but they still call for consideration of a number of concepts of no interest to a customer. In conversing with customers, it's preferable to use a highly abstract modeling language that focuses on a single subject matter—the subject matter of interest to the customer—and yet is specific and concrete enough to be executed. In other words, we need an executable model.

Executable models allow developers to model the underlying semantics of a subject matter without having to worry about, for example, the number of processors, the data-structure organization, or the number of threads. In other words, just as programming languages conferred independence ...