An Atom Template is a reusable asset. It's a piece of your development knowledge that you know will be used many times over, or at least several times.
It's a fact that metamodeling takes some additional time over traditional programming. The first time you model a feature, it will take longer than just coding it directly. However, the second time you need the same feature, it is much faster to reuse the metamodel than doing it again. This is specially true if the code is not constant, that is, it contains parts that may change according to context.
Using metamodels (Atom Templates in the case of ABSE) brings several added benefits that positively influence productivity, like:
- Quickly reusing existing knowledge (code or other artifacts)
- Reusing tried and tested code instead of doing it again (and risk introducing new bugs)
- Enforcing best practices and architectures
- Guidance for unskilled developers through model constraints, avoiding architecture fragility |
Code reuse
Effective reuse is the holy grail of software development ROI. Each time you successfully reuse your knowledge, you are doing more with less, and that's the way to go if we want to tackle the ever-increasing need for software with a finite work force.
“To realize a return on the investments we make in developing the solutions, we must reuse them enough to more than recover the cost of their development, either directly through cost reductions, or indirectly, through time to market reductions and quality improvements.”
Jack Greenfield et al - “Software Factories”
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