Filter
Top Products
8 Model Driven Systems Development with Rational Products
You can see how the situation progresses. Many restaurants now have someone
to greet the customer, someone to seat them, someone to take their order,
someone to pour beverages, someone to cook the order, someone to deliver it to
the table, someone to deliver and collect the bill, someone to clear and set
tables. The end goals remain the same, the tasks to be performed remain the
same, but specialized roles are created to increase the restaurant’s capacity and
throughput. However, as noted before, the increased capacity comes at a cost,
both in increased salaries and increased management complexity—you now
have quite a staff to manage. The cost must be balanced against the increased
capacity.
Finally, as opposed to suffering through these options by painful experience and
trial and error, you could model the various options and run simulations to learn
what could happen and to better understand the implications of your options. You
might save yourself a lot of pain, suffering, and the loss of your time and money.
You would certainly be better informed about your options, and increased
knowledge reduces uncertainty and risk.
MDSD provides ways to reason about these issues—both for systems and for
business processes.
Scalability: Isomorphic composite structures and recursion
Systems are composite structures; that is, they are made up of distinct pieces.
Not only are they composite structures, they are isomorphic;
11
that is, each piece
of the composite structure has a similar or identical structure itself. Composite
isomorphic structures lend themselves to being processed recursively. MDSD is
scalable because it is a recursive methodology. We can use it to reason about a
system of any size. At each level of abstraction (or more precisely, at each model
level, and at each level of decomposition)
12
we perform basically the same
activities: understand the context of the system under consideration, understand
the collaboration required to achieve the system’s desired goals, and understand
how function is distributed across form to achieve system goals within a set of
constraints.
Benefits of model-driven systems development
MDSD provides many benefits. These are some of of the more significant ones:
Reduction of risk
Enhanced team communication
11
Isomorphic comes from the Greek ισο (iso) meaning “same” and μορφοσ (morphos) “form”
12
See Chapter 2 discussion of model levels.