Applying UML and MDA to real systems design

Traditionally system design has been made from a black box/functionality only perspective which forces the developer to concentrate on how the functionality can be decomposed and recomposed into so called components. While this technique is well established and well known, it does suffer from some drawbacks. Now that ideas such as the OMG's model based architecture (MDA) or model based engineering (MBE) (the terms are generally interchangeable) and the ubiquitous modelling language, UML (Unified Modeling Language), are being used (allegedly) and desired, we face a number of challenges to existing techniques. The paper examines these challenges.