xvi PREFACE
Q1
PART I
BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
We start by introducing Domain-Speci?¬?c Modeling (DSM). First we highlight the
difference to manual coding and to modeling languages originating from the code
world. This difference is demonstrated with a practical example. In Chapter 2, we
describe the main bene?¬?ts of DSM: increase in productivity and quality as well as
use of expertise to share the knowledge within the development team.
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 SEEKING A BETTER LEVEL OF ABSTRACTION
Throughout the history of software development, developers have always sought
to improve productivity by improving abstraction. The new level of abstraction
has then been automatically transformed to the earlier ones. Today, however,
advances in traditional programming languages and modeling languages are
contributing relatively little to productivity??”at least if we compare them to the
productivity increases gained when we moved from assembler to third generation
languages (3GLs) decades ago. A developer could then effectively get the same
functionality by writing just one line instead of several earlier. Today, hardly
anybody considers using UML or Java because of similar productivity gains.
Here Domain-Speci?¬?c Modeling (DSM) makes a difference: DSM raises the level
of abstraction beyond current programming languages by specifying the solution
directly using problem domain concepts.
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