Model-driven communications and collaborative software development

Custom languages inherently associated – via meta-modelling – with the concrete organization of software systems, can promote not only better products, but can also allow people to efficiently describe and understand their collaboration, by identifying relevant relationships among tasks, developers and artifacts within a particular work context. This paper makes reference to Contact \[1\], a language usable as a meta-model for high-level communications within distributed systems, to show how it can promote structured forms of collaborations between workers with different skills and scope (e.g. customers, application designers and system designers), by providing at the same time other important benefits typical of the Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) approach \[2\]: i) the formal definition of a conceptual space useful in all the phases of software development; ii) the possibility to build a custom software factory that explicitly represents and spread the know-how of a company; iii) the automated construction of infrastructures tailored to application needs; iv) the usage of models as a new form of source code that can allow application designers to write platform-independent code.