Theory Driven Modeling as the Core of Software Development

Abstract

Some experts opine that software is built in a primitive way. The role of modeling as a treatment for the weakness of software engineering became more important when the principles of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) appeared. Its main advantage is architectural separation of concerns. It showed the necessity of modeling and opened the way for software development to become an engineering discipline. However, this principle does not demonstrate its whole potential power in practice because of lack of mathematical accuracy in the very initial steps of software development. The sufficiency of modeling in software development is still disputable. The authors believe that software development in general (and modeling in particular) based on mathematical formalism in all of its stages and together with the implemented principle of architectural separation of concerns can become an important part of software engineering in its real sense. They propose the formalism by topological modeling of system functioning as the first step towards engineering.