When I was at the university, I remember being very interested in the suggestion that building software was like building bridges, and that software should have blueprints as sophisticated as those needed to build a bridge. I remember to has been told that you will never find a book on “How to build bridges in 7 days” but you will find the equivalent on “how to learn C++ in 7 days”.

Today, I’m not so convinced that this analogy is a good one. I can’t agree more with this quote from Dave Thomas (the Pragmatic Programmers proposed a new analogy that I’m pretty sure not everyone can digest):

Software development is neither. Nor is it art. It’s just software development. People who look for the “software is like xxx” analogies are missing the point. Software development is like software development. Let’s decide what works for us, and have fun while doing it

If you are interested, Martin Fowler explains the reasons why the building bridges analogy fails. I think, there is a sentence in his article that summarizes the problem very well:

Can you get a design that is capable of turning the coding into a predictable construction activity? And if so, is cost of doing this sufficiently small to make this approach worthwhile?

This question is, obviously, rhetorical. You won’t. Traditionally, the gap between models and code has been huge. If you ignore this gap, you may think that you have to make great efforts in creating very rich models, so the low-skilled and no-talented programmer can translate them into working code. And if you can create these models, nothing stops you from planning the full development process up-front. Since the construction phase is mechanical and predictable, you only have to calculate how much time you will have to spend in modeling. And since modeling is about drawing (if we use this development approach we are using UML for modeling everything for sure), this estimation should be easy too. After all, drawings, like Word documents or Power Point slides, always compile and work. Of course, this scenery would mean that software projects are delivered on time, that the waterfall approach works, and that no matter wether the developers are talented or not.

In my opinion, the fact that models can’t be converted into code easily is addressed by the two development approaches I am more interested in:

  • Agile development

  • Model Driven Engineering (MDE)

Although both approaches are perfectly compatible, they propose different ways when it comes to use models. Both approaches see models as a communication tool, as a resource that let us, as humans, reason and elaborate solutions that solve complex problems. While agile practitioners warns you against using models for anything more than this, MDE practitioners propose to take the next step and convert models into first-class development artifacts.

The two approaches give different answers to the question of being able to create designs that can turn the coding into a predictable activity:

  • Agile developers’ answer is “no”. In fact, they propose to use many good development practices and exhaustive testing as a shield against problems when coding. Coding is not an ugly phase, neither is cleanly separated from design. There are not designers and programmers, there are developers. They will use models as a way to collaboratively obtain the best designs that solve the problem, not as a way of documenting it. And since they assume they can’t predict how the full process is going to be in earlier stages with detail, they are going to estimate and develop the project iteratively, using an empirical estimating approach.

  • The MDE answer is a little bit more complex to determine, since the paradigm is in its earlier stages. But if we manage to have MDE solutions where we can define the best DSLs to describe a problem, and to specify how this input is translated into a working application, if these DSLs are defined in a way that are reusable in different instances of the same problem, we would be very close to being able to answer “yes” to that question.

Problem is that Agile is a reality we can use today. MDE is a promise that still needs to be validated in real world situations.