The MDArte Experience Organizational Aspects Acquired from a Successful Partnership between Government and Academia using Model-Driven Development Rodrigo Salvador Monteiro 1 , Roque Elias Assumpção Pinel 2 , Geraldo Zimbrão 2 and Jano Moreira de Souza 2 1 Computer Science Department, Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Niterói, Brazil 2 COPPE, Graduate School of Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Keywords: MDA, Organizational Aspects, Practical Experience, Success Cases. Abstract: Developing and evolving critical information systems in order to cope with changes in regulations and laws is a constant worry for governments in the e-Government era. Due to the frequent challenges and some previous frustrating experiences, the Brazilian Government has searched for an alternative development method that could better fit its needs. At the same time, Brazilian Academia, represented in this case by the Computer Science Department of COPPE/UFRJ, has been researching how to bridge the gaps in order to harness the promise of Model-Driven Architecture in real life projects. A successful partnership between both started in 2005, which gave birth to a complete MDA development environment that would later be known as MDArte. The MDArte framework has been freely available since 2009 through the SPB portal (Brazilian Public Software Portal – www.softwarepublico.gov.br) and throughout its construction and evolution more than a dozen real projects have been built and maintained. During the development of such real life projects a lot of critical organizational aspects raised. The main contribution of this paper is to reveal and motivate the discussion on such organizational aspects that must be faced when deciding to adopt an MDA approach. In order to contextualize our perceptions, we present the MDArte experience, including its origin, evolution and current state. The major challenging and complex systems that have been developed with MDArte are presented as success cases along with an analysis of the benefits of using a Model Driven Development (MDD) approach. 1 INTRODUCTION The Model-Driven Architecture (MDA, 2003) approach as released by the Object Management Group (OMG, 2013) aims at addressing a whole bunch of recurrent problems faced in information systems development. The promises of the MDA approach are attractive and the benefits presented in slide sheets make any software development manager yell, ‘I do want to use that!’ However, using the MDA approach in practice is far from trivial as can be confirmed by other initiatives (Rios et al., 2006); (Staron, 2006). There are huge cultural and technical gaps that may lead your pilot project to fail. Understanding the current limitations on one hand and the powerful potential in the medium and long run on the other hand, are key issues in avoiding unrealistic expectations. In this paper we describe the origin, evolution and current state of the MDArte framework (MDArte, 2013) in order to pinpoint the challenges involved in the adoption of an MDA approach. The MDArte framework has delivered a dozen information systems. Two of them that are considered to be the most challenging are presented as success cases: SICONV and SGDC-P. Their business contexts are addressed, the major challenges are pointed out, and issues where the MDA proved its value are highlighted. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the origin, history and current state of the MDArte framework; two success cases – the SGDC- P and SICONV are reported, respectively, in sections 3 and 4; section 5 summarizes the lessons learned regarding organizational aspects through almost ten years of experience; and finally, we conclude the paper in section 6 and outline the next steps as future work. 575 Salvador Monteiro R., Elias Assumpção Pinel R., Zimbrão G. and Moreira de Souza J.. The MDArte Experience - Organizational Aspects Acquired from a Successful Partnership between Government and Academia using Model-Driven Development. DOI: 10.5220/0004714305750584 In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (MODELSWARD-2014), pages 575-584 ISBN: 978-989-758-007-9 Copyright c  2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)