SUMMING UP THE PARTS

This chapter summarizes the main results described in this book and challenges and strategic directions in MDA reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing software systems to extract software artifacts at a higher level of abstraction. Nowadays, software and system engineering industry evolves to manage new platform technologies, design techniques and processes. Architectural framework for information integration and tool interoperation, such as MDA, had created the need to develop new analysis tools and specific techniques. MDA is not itself a technology specification but it represents an evolving plan to achieve cohesive model-driven technology specifications. The original inspiration around the definition of MDA had to do with the middleware integration problem in internet. Beyond interoperability reasons, there are other good benefits to use MDA such as to improve the productivity, process quality and maintenance costs. The outstanding ideas behind MDA are separating the specification of the system functionality from its implementation on specific platforms, managing the software evolution from abstract models to implementations increasing the degree of automation and achieving interoperability with multiple platforms, programming languages and formal languages.