Metamodelling for Software Engineering

3.6 SUMMARY

The history of software engineering has been one of increasing the level of abstraction. In particular, in going from basic programming (coding) to modelling prior to coding, the use of metamodels to formally define those modelling languages was introduced in the mid-1990s [2; 3; 13; 14; 24]. By the end of the decade, these ideas were being applied to process as well as to work products. Integration of process, product and producer aspects of software development (i.e. a methodology) was also much in evidence at that time – although many problems were identified (see Chapter 4) that prevented true integration until solutions were proposed in the first decade of the 21st century (Chapter 5). In parallel, metamodels were the key technology for the creation of the vision of model-driven (software) engineering, which has still to mature – the number of industries currently using such an approach to software development, although a small percentage worldwide, is growing rapidly. The ideas of MDE, in all its commercial variants, would appear to be a highly promising growth area for the application of metamodels in software engineering – as well as the vital contribution metamodels make to the various work product (e.g. UML), process (e.g. SPEM) and methodology (e.g. ISO/IEC 24744) standards.