Collaborative evolution process in MDArte: Exchanging solutions for information systems development among projects

Information Systems Development faces a lot of recurrent issues that must be addressed in every project. A lot of common requirements and features repeatedly appear on different projects challenging the development team. Exchanging solutions and the expertise gained over the evaluation of such solutions among projects can prevent the development teams from reinventing the wheel. The MDArte framework has been used to develop information systems through the Model Driven Architecture approach, automating the generation from models reaching around 80% of the application code. Most important in the present context is that the MDArte framework turned out to be a common platform between the adherent projects used to share new solutions and features. This paper presents how the MDArte framework evolves through the collaboration of the adherent projects. It also provides examples of features developed and evaluated by one project, shared and applied in other projects. This level of collaboration between different projects on one hand accelerates the development and on the other hand prevents from neglecting important issues on information systems development.