Towards an MDA-oriented methodology

With the introduction of the Model Driven Architecture by the OMG, modeling technology seems to have taken the initiative in middleware technology for distributed application development. The MDA recommends the separation of the business from technical aspects in the development of applications. Modeling techniques offer tools providing abstraction that enables the isolation of business concerns from their technical achievement. EDOC Profile is an example of such a tool as it provides a modeling framework. It makes use of the RM-ODP architectural framework that provides conceptual tools. These tools, however, remain insufficient in the sense that they do not provide any process to guide software designers in the modeling step, i.e., they are not methodological tools. We present a methodology based on the RM-ODP that falls under the MDA initiative. We describe its principles by illustrating them with an example. We then provide research directions enabling a fully compliant MDA methodology.