The Relevance of Software Modeling to the Software Industry

A good percentage of papers submitted to software development related conferences are related to the subject of modeling. To many researchers, model-driven development is the answer to most software reliability/development problems. They argue that models help the architects to reason about the problem and solution domains, and can potentially be used to formally prove that any solution meets its specification (again another area of considerable research interest). But in the midst of this massive interest in modeling from the research fraternity, industry appears to take a more ambivalent attitude, often viewing modeling as a useful methodology but having limitations. Additionally some in industry are moving away from formal methodologies, in applying techniques such as XP or agile methods.