Model development

In 2001, the Object Management Group (OMG), an IT industry standards body, came up with the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), an approach to software development grounded on the principles of high-level abstraction and hardware independence. Using MDA, teams of developers, it was proposed, would build a model of their system, which would then be used to create not just working prototypes but almost all the software code of the finished application. In its current version, 1.5, UML lacks the full functionality needed to realise the MDA ideal. The next release, UML 2, is intended to overcome the deficiencies of UML 1.5, adding features to fully support MDA and allow tools to generate working software code from UML models in a standard way.