Embedded system construction - Evaluation of model-driven and component-based development approaches

Model-driven development has become an important engineering paradigm. It is said to have many advantages over traditional approaches, such as reuse or quality improvement, also for embedded systems. Along a similar line of argumentation, component-based software engineering is advocated. In order to investigate these claims, the MARMOT method was applied to develop several variants of a small micro-controller-based automotive subsystem. Several key figures, like model size and development effort were measured and compared with figures coming from two mainstream methods: the Unified Process and Agile Development. The analysis reveals that model-driven, component-oriented development performs well and leads to maintainable systems and a higher-than-normal reuse rate.