Why is it that some companies report spectacular success with MDD whereas others fail to adopt it? The answer to this riddle can usually be put down to social and organizational factors rather than technical ones. This interactive session will explore why MDD fails or succeeds and how social/organizational issues can be addressed in the future.

The session will be structured around the results of a year long project which has been applying methods from social science to understand MDD usage and adoption. Based on an OMG-supported questionnaire, in-depth interviews with over thirty companies, and observational study in industry, a number of common success / failure factors have been identified.

Session participants are asked to come along and say whether they agree or disagree with the findings, and contribute their own thoughts on how social and organizational factors affect MDD uptake.

Jon Whittle is Chair of Software Engineering and Royal Society Wolfson Merit Fellow at Lancaster University. He serves on the Steering Committee of the MODELS Conference and was its Chair from 2007-2009. He has widely published on MDD and, prior to returning to academia, was involved with a number of projects applying MDD or related technologies at NASA. He is currently leading the EAMDE project, an interdisciplinary study with social scientists, which aims to understand and document the factors affecting how companies succeed or fail with MDD.

John Hutchinson is a senior researcher in the Computing Department at Lancaster University and is leading the activities in the EAMDE project to understand how MDD is used in industry. John has worked on a variety of software engineering projects, e.g., in component based and service oriented software engineering. He has also worked extensively in industry, most recently with Isis Forensics, but also on large scale software engineering projects with BAE Systems.