ABSE reusable assets and models can be iteratively created. No big up-front investment is necessary. However ABSE does not exempt you, as any development task, from investing in a good up-front strategy.
Application prototyping and scaffolding is possible: You can build "empty" reusable assets (Atom Templates) that only contain the design intent, and create models with those Atoms, effectively building a prototype of an application to be built and some design and architecture tests be carried out without having any real code at all.
All project stakeholders can work around the same model: Requirement Atoms can be created and used by the customer to specify not only their needs but also domain knowledge. Those Atoms can later be linked to architecture specific Atoms and, on their turn, to implementation-specific Atoms. Whenever requirements and/or achitecture changes, these Atom links can be traced back and forth so that quick, dynamic changes to the application be performed within a very narrow scope.
The iterative nature of ABSE and AtomWeaver allows an agile development team to take the next step to model-driven development without the Big Design Up Front burden. ABSE models are live and changes can be done and predicted in realtime. |
What's Big Design Up Front?
Big Design Up Front (BDUF) is a term for a software development approach where the program's design must be completed and perfected before its implementation starts. The latest generation of developers associate it with the waterfall model.
Several ExtremeProgramming (XP) supporters say that such "big" designs are not necessary, and that most of the design should happen throughout the entire development process. While XP still has some initial design, it's considered to be a "small" design.
BDUF supporters say that the time spent in designing is a worthwhile investment, because less time and effort is spent fixing a bug in the early stages of a software products lifecycle than when that same bug is found and fixed at later stages.
|
