Government funded MDE research collaboration between Solms TCD, University of Pretoria

Stefan Gruner's Formal methods research arm at the University of Pretoria and Solms Training, Consulting and Development (Solms TCD) have been collaborating in the context of the URDAD-MDE research group.

This collaboration has been granted recognition and funding by the National Research Foundation (NRF) under the umbrella of THRIP, the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Program of the NRF.

Solms TCD has put a lot of effort into maturing business analysis and software development processes. One of the outcomes is the Use Case, Responsibility Driven Analysis and Design methodology (URDAD). The research project acknowledges the potential of URDAD to provide significant value to business analysts and to facilitate code and documentation generation in the context of model driven development (MDE). The research project provides practical, industry-relevant projects (with funding) to a number of postgraduate students.

The business analysis (BA) domain has matured significantly over the last few years. BAs are generally expected to do solid requirements elicitation and business process design using rigorous models and methodologies.

URDAD is being successfully used in many organisations by both BA and developer teams, providing well documented business processes that can be effectively maintained within the context of a business model.

Fritz Solms, MD, “is delighted to see the enthusiasm with which the government, the University of Pretoria and a number of students have taken up the opportunity to collaborate on this industry relevant project. Business analysis is growing rapidly in terms of responsibilities and maturity, and this collaboration can significantly add to the value business analysts can provide to the organisation, and the ability of technical teams to automate the implementation mapping of technology neutral business process designs.”

Prospective research students (honours, MSc or Phd students) who would like to do their project in this area of research are welcome to contact Dr Stefan Gruner at the University of Pretoria.

Sifiso Motha says: “It is nice to see academia getting involved in projects which are relevant to industry. URDAD is not only important to typical enterprise systems, but can also be effectively used to more technical systems like design embedded systems.”