Significant Productivity Enhancement through Model Driven Techniques: A Success Story

This paper describes the automation and optimization of a software development process of NTT Data. The target systems of this development process are web based information systems running on a J2EE platform. The automation and optimization of that process was achieved by the application of model driven techniques, mainly the integration of development tools via a Meta Object Facility (MOF) repository backbone.The internal evaluation of NTT Data pointed out a development effort and time reduction of more than 50%. The main lessons learned form this case include the necessity of model-to-model transformations, the need to preserve advantage of existing development process and tools landscape, the requirements to care about configuration and change management from the beginning and the requirements to support also non modeling tools. Also, we identified a new business role, which is that of a tool and process integrator.