Introspective Model-Driven Development

In this paper, we propose a new approach to model-driven development, which we call introspective model-driven development (IMDD). This approach relies heavily on some well-understood underlying abstractions, in order to bridge the abstraction gap between the requirements and the actual executable system. These abstractions are object-oriented programming languages and frameworks as a means of architectural abstraction. The main idea of IMDD is to annotate the extension points of a framework explicitly, which enables the automatic introspection of the defined metamodel. In a second step, a model of the customizations can be obtained by model introspection. There are two kinds of introspective frameworks – introspective blackbox and introspective whitebox frameworks. We developed an extension of the Eclipse IDE, which supports introspective model-driven development. Furthermore, we discuss the characteristics of the proposed approach, compared to established generative approaches.