Executable Models

Imagine...

A work place where your regular tasks involve analyzing and modeling the parts of system based on stories (or requirements, whatever) and writing few snippets of instructions. You've a world class IDE with some wonderful perspectives, editors, views and a state of art execution infrastructure. The IDE allows quick execution of your models to test them, allows visual model debugging while encouraging ergonomics to prevent heavy "keying and mousing", IDE supporting finest model refactoring to allow painless design change, while providing real time collaboration for distributed brainstorming and discussions...

You pair model it, you test drive it, you version it at finer granular unit of control, you've a catalogue of blueprints (design + domain) which can be used statically as well as in context of existing system, you have continuous integration of models which compiles, validates (tests) and builds the system. At end of the day, you've a system which can simulate in development environment as well as deployable as production software....

Imagine a execution infrastructure able interpret UML (relax, take unambiguous parts of UML or Mellor subsets) directly, or may be it emits a script which can be plugged in existing JVM, or may be UML VM itself with attach on demand and hot model replacements :) ....

I dream to be in such an environment as well as developing such environment.

Realize....

These imaginations, although will sound like philosophies, are not without basis, existing tools and technologies can be leveraged and bridged to provide this envisioned platform; it's hard, takes lot of resources but not impossible. Ok, it will not give quick returns, will have adoption problems which can be handled.

At first, Executable UML will seem like a buzzword, to me it sounded daunting and it seemed like everyone wants to change the world. That change is for good, how long you want to work with something as ugly as XML or JSP and other complexities which in no way adds to customer requirements? They deserve to be generated or they don't even deserve to be in our codebase (I should say modelbase :) ).

Executability of models is not something entirely new (apart from Virtual Machines, OOP etc.), guys like Steven Mellor and Marc Balcer are working on it for quite sometime now.

If you feel, that, support for such tooling is not enough; Let me tell you, Eclipse has made such feeling "Past"; With Eclipse, We can leverage most of the Eclipse related technologies for achieving it, ECF for collaboration, UML/EMF/GEF/GMF for modeling, Debug Framework and GEF for simulation and model debugging (in this case, we may need to change the abstraction semantics of stack frames etc.) . Of course building VM or runtime is non-trivial, but it's worth trying alternative approaches like integrating with existing runtime.

This is the time for improving the software crafting (or engineering?), no one needs costly software, and current fashions make them expensive; Well its different topic to debate about productivity levels of existing methods but it can surely be improved.