Evaluating the Benefits of Model-Driven Development

Abstract

Researchers have been evaluating the benefits of Model-Driven Development (MDD) for more than a decade now. Although some works suggest that MDD decreases development time, other works limit MDD benefits to academic exercises and to developers without experience. To clarify the benefits of MDD, we present the results of our experiment, which compares MDD and Code-centric Development (CcD) in terms of correctness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Our experiment achieves fidelity to real-world settings because the tasks are taken from real-world video game development, and the subjects use domain frameworks as they are used in real-world developments. Our results challenge previous ideas that limit the benefits of MDD to academic exercises and to developers without experience. Furthermore, our results also suggest that understanding the benefits of MDD might require researchers to rethink their experiments to include the social part of software development.