Scientific Workflows with XMDD: A Way to Use Process Modeling in Computational Science Education

Abstract

Process models are well suited to describe in a formal but still intuitive fashion what a system should do. They can thus play a central role in problem-based computational science education with regard to qualifying students for the design and implementation of software applications for their specific needs without putting the focus on the technical part of coding. eXtreme Model Driven Design (XMDD) is a software development paradigm that explicitly focuses on the What (solving problems) rather than on the How (the technical skills of writing code). In this paper we describe how we apply an XMDD-based process modeling and execution framework for scientific workflow projects in the scope of a computer science course for students with a background in natural sciences.

Scientific workflows with the jABC framework

“…By the end of 2015, more than 200 students had attended the courses, and accordingly we feel confident in saying that the approach has been validated in both research and education environments. Detailed experience reports about the courses are available in [56,57].…”

“…Concerning the provenance of the implemented workflow models, -some of these case studies were developed by members of our team to serve as demonstration or proofof-concept applications (such as the study described in [58]), -a large number of standard or representative workflows has been implemented by the students in the different editions of our "Process Modeling in Scientific Applications" courses [56,57], -others emerged from research activities or cooperation projects with partners from a particular field of research (such as [7,29,51,62,74]), -and some more projects have been carried out by external users (such as [21,103]). …”