An empirical study of the state of the practice and acceptance of model-driven engineering in four industrial cases

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been promoted for many years as a means for handling the complexity of software development by raising the abstraction level and automating labor-intensive and error-prone tasks. However, there is little empirical evidence of the acceptance of MDE in industry which is the subject of this paper. The goal of this empirical study was to investigate the state of the practice of applying MDE and factors considered as important for its adoption. The subjects were developers of four large companies participating in a research project. The collected data came from multiple sources and covered the results of tool evaluations, interviews, and a survey. Among the factors, we found perceived usefulness, ease of use and the maturity of the tools to be important determinants for the adoption of MDE. We also discuss challenges with adopting MDE and present suggestions on how to succeed with the adoption process.