Abstract. An oft-cited reason for lack of adoption of model-driven engineering (MDE) is poor tool support. However, studies have shown that adoption problems are as much to do with social and organizational factors as with tooling issues. This paper discusses the impact of tools on MDE adoption and places tooling within a broader organizational context.

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book. Companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders' requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods. Company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process' suitability by up to 5%.

OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao. Abstract. Although model-driven engineering (MDE) is now an established approach for developing complex software systems, it has not been universally adopted by the software industry. In order to better understand the reasons for this, as well as to identify future opportunities for MDE, we carried out a week-long design thinking experiment with 15 MDE experts. Participants were facilitated to identify the biggest problems with current MDE technologies, to identify grand challenges for society in the near future, and to identify ways that MDE could help to address these challenges. The outcome is a reflection of the current strengths of MDE, an outlook of the most pressing challenges for society at large over the next three decades, and an analysis of key future MDE research opportunities.

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Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Although poor tool support is often blamed for the low uptake of model-driven engineering (MDE), recent studies have shown that adoption problems are as likely to be down to social and organizational factors as with tooling issues. This article discusses the impact of tools on MDE adoption and practice and does so whilst placing tooling within a broader organizational context. The article revisits previous data on MDE use in industry (19 in-depth interviews with MDE practitioners) and re-analyzes that data through the specific lens of MDE tools in an attempt to identify and categorize the issues that users had with the tools they adopted. In addition, the article presents new data: 20 new interviews in two specific companies-and analyzes it through the same lens. A key contribution of the paper is a loose taxonomy of tool-related considerations, based on empirical industry data, which can be used to reflect on the tooling landscape as well as inform future research on MDE tools.

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