Project Plan
This outlines the original project plan
EA-MDE - Empirical Assessment of the Efficacy of MDE - is a pilot project which aims to test the feasibility of assessing MDE practices empirically for the benefit of industry considering MDE adoption. As a pilot project, we intend to carry out a series of relatively small scale tasks which will collect and assimilate information on the way MDE is used in practice which we will use to determine which approaches work best and provide the most valuable insights into MDE use.
MDE?
Many flavours of MD* are owned commercially and so the use of MDE is quite pragmatic. However, we aim to be neutral in our coverage and we consider many activities that are variously described as MDE, MD*, MBE, MBSE, and others as using DSLs or DSMLs, to be within our remit. Another way of saying this is that is that we are interested in hearing and collaborating with people who have interests in any of these different areas.
What will EA-MDE be doing?
Initially, EA-MDE will be asking questions. Lots of questions. We wish to understand what factors have a positive or negative effect on attempts to use MDE on real projects. That knowledge exists within the industrial community which has experience of trying to deploy MDE tools and processes on real projects with real money invested, real deadlines to meet and real profits at stake. This doesn't mean that we are not interested in speaking to academics, many of whom have extensive contacts with, and experience of, industrial projects and usage. However, we are not overly interested in theoretical work at this stage - instead, we want to hear about experience, lessons learned, "war stories". Even "MDE adoption nightmares" are of interest. Perhaps "MDE adoption nightmares" are especially of interest! The point is that together with our Advisory Panel we will use this information to begin to build a picture of what the common patterns are concerning how MDE is used, causing some projects to succeed and some to fail.
How will be asking those questions?
We will deploy a number of techniques to elicit the information we require. In some cases, these represent differing levels of involvement on behalf of our collaborators, for example, we intend to use the following methods:
- Online questionnaires
- Structured/semi-structured interviews
- Observational studies
to collect information from practitioners (companies and individuals) who have experience of using MDE on projects. We also intend to use:
- Online surveys
- "Expert" interviews
to elicit further information from those with extensive experience of the MDE field in order to make the most of that experience.
We have extensive experience of conducting these sorts of projects and have Ethical Protocols in place to protect individual collaborators and other agreements that explicitly protect the valuable IP of participating companies. In the vast majority of cases, our interests lie in issues that have absolutely no connection to a company's IP, instead we are interested in experience, processes, etc. However, we recognise that this is a significant legitimate concern for any commercial organisation and we aim to ensure that any worries are addressed.
What next?
What next for the project? Or what next if you are interested in participating? In the latter case, get in touch with us and we will discuss how you can contribute to the project, and hopefully benefit from the results. In the sense of what next for the project - well, we've only just started - but we see this work growing into a much larger study. That larger study will attempt to reach out to an even wider group of inviduals and companies with the aim of providing the understanding that is needed to guide the proper adoption of MDE technologies and processes in industry. There will be more about this in the future.
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