Service-orientation: Conquering complexity with XMDD

We advocate a new direction for mastering complexity in service-oriented design of complex applications: eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD). It is a new application development paradigm that is extreme in that it is designed to involve the customer/application expert continuously throughout the whole systems' life cycle, and it is model-driven because it is based on the ‘One-Thing Approach’, which works by successively enriching and refining one single artifact that is a rich model. With XMDD, system development becomes in essence a pathway to user-centric orchestration of intuitive service functionality. XMDD differs radically from classical software development, which in our opinion, is no longer adequate for the bulk of application programming, because the profile of todays's applications has changed and demands agility and a leaner development style. This need is particularly evident when it comes to heterogeneous, cross-organizational systems, which must adapt to rapidly changing market requirements. XMDD addresses the needs via a model-driven, lightweight, and cooperative development paradigm that puts the user process at the center of development and the application expert in control of the process evolution.