As the industry is now moving towards IoT, 5G, and digital transformation, the ever-increasing complexity of the software and the need to deliver customized solutions faster and, possibly, on demand is forcing organizations to revisit their way-of-working. Their ability to succeed in the new economy appears to directly depend on them achieving increasing levels of development and business agility despite increasing demands and complexity.
Model-Based Engineering (MBE) has proven to be highly successful in many different industrial contexts over the last decades. Modeling is used for a wide range of aspects, including, software design, system engineering, information modeling, network architecture, testing, enterprise architecture, and business process modeling. As such, modeling is considered to be an essential aspect of complex software and system development. Nonetheless, a number of factors have been limiting a broader adoption of MBE.
Today’s market of modelling tools and Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSML) is mainly divided in two categories, each having advantages and disadvantages: one based on graphical modeling (e.g., UML tools, MathWorks Simulink/Matlab, EAST-ADL, and Microsoft Visual Studio), and another based on textual modeling (Eclipse Xtext, MetaDepth, EMFText, and JetBrains MPS). In general, graphical modeling tools are typically better suited for describing and visualizing a set of entities and their relationships as found, e.g., in software architectures and state machines. However, they are also considered more cumbersome and less efficient to use than textual editors. On the other hand, textual modelling tools are typically considered easier to use by a majority of software engineers as they provide widely-used and familiar editor capabilities (e.g., copy&paste, search&replace, auto-completion, etc), but large systems and complex relationships can be difficult to understand using textual representations.
Support for fully synchronized, hybrid textual/graphical modeling, that would allow taking advantage of both representation formats and switching seamlessly between them, has been proposed to increase development productivity and agility. Over the last years, several research projects have investigated the potential combination of textual and graphical modeling for different use cases, including information modeling, system modeling, and software development. While these projects have confirmed some of the main claimed benefits of hybrid textual/graphical modeling, they also identified key issues that need to be addressed to develop scalable industrial solutions.
In this panel, we will discuss