Exchanging solutions for Information Systems Development using a model pattern perspective: Diagram templates in the context of the Mdarte Collaborative Evolution Process

Information Systems Development faces many recurrent issues that must be addressed in every project. A lot of common requirements and features repeatedly appear on different projects challenging the development team. Exchanging solutions and the expertise gained over the evaluation of such solutions among projects can prevent the development teams from reinventing the wheel. The MDArte framework has been used to develop information systems through the Model Driven Architecture approach, automating the generation from models reaching around 80% of the application code. Most important is that the MDArte framework turned out to be a common platform between the adherent projects used to share new solutions and features. This paper focus on recurrent issues present at the modeling phase. We applied the concept of Model Patterns in order to provide diagram templates. A set of diagram templates were designed, implemented and evaluated by a volunteer project. The feedback was extremely positive and the proposed approach proves to be very promising. This level of collaboration between different projects on one hand accelerates the development and on the other hand prevents from neglecting important issues on information systems development.