CAiSE’13

Short-bio

Luís Ferreira Pires obtained his PhD degree from the University of Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands) in 1994, and he is as currently an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Twente. His professional interests are design methodologies and architectures for distributed systems, particularly Model-driven engineering, Semantic web, Service-oriented architectures and Context-aware applications.

Abstract

Recent research results have shown that Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a beneficial approach to develop software systems. The reduction of development time enabled by code generation mechanisms is often acknowledged as an important benefit to be further explored. This paper reports on an experiment in which an MDD-based approach using code generation from models is compared with manual coding based on the classic life-cycle. In this experiment, groups of senior students from Computer Science and Computer Engineering undergraduate academic programs implemented a web application using both approaches, and we evaluated in quantitative terms the performance of the groups. The results showed that the development time when code generation was applied was consistently shorter than otherwise. The participants also indicated that they found less difficulties when applying code generation.