In all engineering disciplines nowadays, software engineering excluded, there exists an established engineering process to develop a system, which is… - Bernhard Rumpe

The growing complexity of software is the motivation behind work on industrializing software development. In particular, current research in the area of (MDE) is primarily concerned with reducing the gap between problem and software implementation domains through the use of technologies that support systematic transformation of problem-level abstractions to software implementations. The complexity of bridging the gap is tackled through the use of models that describe complex systems at multiple levels of abstraction and from a variety of perspectives, and through automated support for transforming and analyzing models. In the MDE vision of software development, models are the primary artifacts of development and developers rely on computer-based technologies to transform models to running systems.

Advances in hardware and network technologies have paved the way for the development of increasingly pervasive software-based that collaborate to provide essential services to society. Software in these systems is often required to (1) operate in distributed and embedded computing environments consisting of diverse devices (personal computers, specialized sensors and actuators), (2) communicate using a variety of interaction paradigms (e.g., SOAP messaging, media streaming), (3) dynamically adapt to changes in operating environments, and (4) behave in a dependable manner. Despite significant advances in programming languages and supporting integrated development environments (IDEs), developing these complex software systems using current code-centric technologies requires herculean effort.

One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.