Generative Model Driven Design for Agile System Design and Evolution: A Tale of Two Worlds

In order to mainstream the production and evolution of IT at the levels of speed, scale, affordability and collaborative effort needed to truly make IT enter the fabric of every economical and societal endeavour, as is the projected future of our society in the next decade, the ease of learning, understanding, and applying new disruptive technologies must drastically improve. We argue that the needs of the people, the economical sectors, and the large-scale trends can only be met if the IT professions embrace and adopt a new way of producing and consuming IT, based on more formal descriptions, more models, more reasoning and analysis before expensive implementations are incurred, coupled with automatic transformations, generations, and analyses that take advantage of the models and formalized knowledge. We analyse briefly the various dimensions, derive a specification for the new IT and IT platforms, and provide a few examples of how the new thinking can disrupt the status quo but empower a better understanding, a more efficient organization, and a more automatic management of the many cross-dimensional issues that future connected software and systems will depend upon.