Modeling & Tools

Imagine your call center manager, your compliance officer, your warehouse manager and your CFO collaborating to deliver you a complete requirements specification for a new accounts receivable solution. Imagine that specification being used to automatically generate a component model, an information model, a process model, test cases and operational policies for the new solution. Imagine refinements to each of these models being synchronized up, down and across—ensuring that everyone in the organization has access to a current view of the solution in representations that each naturally understands.

Microsoft is focused on developing the tools to make models more useful across the entire software lifecycle—from conception through development, to operations and management.

Our goal is to empower all stakeholders—from the business analyst to the data architect to the security specialist to the network engineer—to contribute their expertise to the evolution of a solution, with a minimum of information loss. We want specialized models to become first-class artifacts in your development and management processes; we want to enable model-driven development and model-driven management.

To engage specialized stakeholders—technical and non-technical alike—we need to provide them with tools that speak their language. A security analyst needs to be able to express requirements using the vocabulary and syntax of security. Ideally, an iconographic representation of that language will support "drawing" the specifications with intuitive symbols and connectors. Such tools already support disciplines such as database design, user-interface design and object modeling. Such domain specific languages (DSLs) can be developed to empower other stakeholders, from the business analyst to the third-shift operations manager.

Visit the MSDN Modeling and Tools Architecture Center for a host of information on Modeling and Tools.