Software development automation, as other automation processes, aims at delegating to the machine some of the tasks involved in this production process. The goal is to achieve a faster development methodology, and therefore a lower cost, and a higher quality of the final product.

SW automation has been a goal pursued previously but not very successfully. Design standards as UML or CASE tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering) have not achieved the expected results. The main cause is that they provide a generic solution (“general purpose”) to solve the set of problems faced by SW.

On the contrary, the new automation approaches provide the tools to design, in a simple and quick way, languages to describe each particular problem. It is this specific approach, not a general purpose, which has enabled success stories in sw automation.

Automation is mainly associated with code generation because, at the end of the day, the source code is the result of this production process, but we should bear in mind that, once these methodologies are used, programming moves from being a set of functional statements to become a knowledge representation where a number of disciplines, such as semantics or automated reasoning, can be applied.

We can conclude this introduction saying that throughout modern history, software has optimized every production process, now it’s time to optimize its own.

With this article we start a series where we will describe in depth this discipline and its implementation in Bheudek.
 

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