  August 2004
Updated July 2005 Software developers in the past typically focused on low-level details of manipulating bits of data and moving bytes between registers in the CPU. Now, increasingly they spend most of their time understanding the users’ problem domain in terms of use cases to be supported and designing solutions that they conceptualize as collaborations of services offering behavior to realize those use cases. This profound shift in thinking is possible because of standards, technologies, and tools that support model-driven development. Model-driven development emphasizes the advantages of modeling at various levels of abstraction and, most important, the integration and flow of information through these models. This approach allows software developers to contribute to a project through the types of models that best match the kinds of information and decisions they make. It also allows senior project members to maximize their effectiveness through their definition and implementations of model-to-model transformations. System analysts, testers, and quality assurance staff can leverage models to analyze the system and its performance before the system is complete. This series of articles focuses on specific tools in the IBM Software Development Platform and how they are used to model a solution for a task in the "Merging disparate IT systems" sample project. That task relates to the requirement for an automated assessment process in a new claims solution for two recently merged insurance companies. Articles take you end to end through the requirements gathering, business modeling, and application development and deployment stages of the solution development process. Along the way, integration issues, exchanges between roles of IT professionals, and the flow of development artifacts between tools are highlighted, as well as support for end-to-end traceability. Link to project implementation.
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