MetaEdit by MetaCASE

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Permalink Reply by Steven Kelly on March 17, 2010 at 18:19

Hi Gordon!

Obviously there are rather a lot of people who have used MetaEdit+: from projects that have been going for 15 years with hundreds of modelers, to the rapidly growing mass of intro licence users.

Maybe the best place to look for in-depth experience reports are the industrial cases that have been published in various journals, books and conferences, many with empirical evidence backing up the 5-10x productivity gains - something I've not seen for any other tool. I've just published a list of some of those on my blog, titled "Domain-Specific Modeling: MDD that works".

You can also read various people's personal experiences, some more detailed cases, and analyst reports.

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Permalink Reply by Gordon Morrison on March 17, 2010 at 20:25

Steve,

Thanks for the feedback, I bought your book and I'm studying it along with using MetaEdit.

Regards,

Gordon Morrison
Author: Breaking the Time Barrier-The Temporal Engineering of Software
Inventor: Multi-Core & Hyper-Threading Technology (US Patent 4,847,755)
Senior Member IEEE; www.vsmerlot.com
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gordon-morrison/0/b49/63

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Permalink Reply by Rui Curado on March 18, 2010 at 11:06

There is an interesting small contradiction (or inaccuracy) in MetaCASE's claims, Steve.

In your blog post, the second graph shows a comparison of the cost (I assume time) of different approaches. You claim that modeling the first product with a DSM tool takes the same time as doing it by manual coding, which I am sure is not correct, by my own experience. This is also backed up by Laurent Safa's paper at DSM'07, one of your DSM reference cases (http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSM07/papers/safa.pdf):

"We found that each page standard took us around 3 man-days to implement the metamodel, the visual notation and the code generation. When compared to an estimated development cost of 0.5 man-day per page, we assumed that any page that occurred 6 times or more was worth metamodeling."

Don't take me wrong. I truly believe in DSM and I think it is the way to go. However I think that the cost of modeling the first product is higher than the traditional manual coding approach.

Care to comment? Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Steven Kelly on March 18, 2010 at 11:52

The second graph doesn't show the cost or time of different approaches, it shows for a constant time how many products you can make with those approaches. Or as the blog text puts it: "Imagine that you can build one product in a certain time by coding. How much more can you build if you apply various kinds of modeling?"

So if in you can build one product with manual coding in a given amount of time, in that same amount of time you can build about 0.85 products with UML, or 1.2-1.3 with MDA, or 5-10 with DSM.

For the second graph we're looking at the "steady state" once you're up to speed: you've learned Java, bought the MDA tool, built your DSM tool etc. As the blog goes on to show in the third graph, there's a start-up cost associated with setting things up for DSM in your domain. I don't try to guess the cost of learning Java, UML or MDA, or buying those tools - I don't know the figures, and for at least Java and UML I guess it's already happened for most developers. Buying a DSM tool is comparable to buying an MDA tool, so with DSM the extra cost is creating the language and generators. That took 3-16 person days in these cases, so isn't huge.

In some cases DSM pays back in the first product (e.g. Polar); in others it takes 2-3 products. That's really more dependent on what constitutes a "product" in each domain: the key thing is DSM paid back within the first four days of modeling in all these cases!

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