Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an approach in software and systems development to create application code, application programming interfaces (API) and specification based on Models. These models are processed through a series of transformations to generate the final application, code or systems to be deployed. Using MDD has multiple benefits over traditional software and systems development, in that it leads to better code quality, better maintainability and has the potential to improve the overall efficiency of a development organization significantly. However "mastering" of MDD can only be achieved with the appropriate tooling support, from modeling support, to code generation, but also for automated testing, continuous integration, etc. While the industry at large provides all of these parts, having a single environment to cover the process from A to Z is key to harvesting the benefits of MDD. Moreover, generic-purpose UML modeling tools offer too much flexibility to non-experienced UML modelers. When working with large distributed teams, it becomes clear that the modeling tool needs to guide and constrain the users according to the target domain. This typically goes beyond UML profiles and require tight naming conventions and validation rules accross a model to ensure the quality of the generated code or specification, in particular in the Telecommunications Industry. Tigerstripe was born two years ago to address this need of a single, integrated environment dedicated to MDD in the Telecommunications Industry: in particular, Tigerstripe was first adopted by Telecommunications standard bodies for Operational and Business Support Systems management interfaces. The product is built using the standard Eclipse Modeling Components (namely EMF/GMF) and provides an extensible MDD framework within Eclipse. In the last two years, the Tigerstripe user-community has been well established within the Telecom Industry, where in particular, Standard Bodies such as the TeleManagement Forum has been delivering standard specification and APIs for Operational and Business Support Systems integration (OSS/BSS) with Tigerstripe.
