Model-driven Software Engineering in Practice: A Content Analysis Software for Health Reform Agreements

The Coordination Reform of 2012 requires Norwegian municipalities and regional health authorities to enter into legally binding service agreements. Although several research projects have been undertaken to analyse the implications of this reform, there is no central database where researches can be given access and analyse the service agreements. In this paper we present how we use model-driven software engineering and user-centric design in an initial development of an information system designed to allow researches to access and analyse service agreements. For this project, it was crucial to discuss the requirements of the system with domain-experts at a high level of abstraction in order to elicit feedback so that the development could proceed at a fast pace and in the right direction. Furthermore, given time and resource constraints, we elected to use a model driven approach using automatic code generation coupled with high-productivity frameworks. In this way we were able to create prototypes so that the developers could get fast feedback from the domain-experts and improvements could be implemented with minimal effort.