A quantitative analysis of model-driven code generation through software experimentation

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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.