India lacks skills for model-driven architecture

India has the second biggest software developers' community, next only to the US, but very few software architects. While at the global level, 10 per cent of the IT professionals are software architects, the figure is a mere 1 per cent in India.

The reason, says Sunil Dutt Jha, CEO of iCMG, a US-headquartered software architecture firm, is the shortage of software professionals at the senior level.

"In India, software professionals after a certain number of years prefer switching over to non-technical positions like project leaders or managers, whereas a software architect needs to be a senior IT professional having strong knowledge of business domain and middleware, apart from consulting and leadership skills," he said.

Speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of Architecture World '06, a software architecture summit jointly organised by iCMG and Compuware Corporation, Jha said India had around 3,000 software architects whereas going by the global standard, the number should be around 30,000.

He said that as firms across businesses use a particular enterprise applications to improve their efficiencies, they often find that the maintenance of the system with the changing of versions and requirements of the companies surpassed the investment towards developing the system.

The answer lies in developing a system where the business model is independent of the technology model. "In this case, changes in technology will not affect the whole system but will be automatically implemented through the system," he added.

The system which is called 'model-driven architecture' (MDA) is gradually becoming a global benchmark for companies looking at long-term investment in their systems applications. "MDA focusses on building the model of the software first based on the business from which you can generate the technology model automatically," he pointed out.

The whole idea of MDA is to decouple the business model from the technology model. This also helps in enhancing software life and make the software faster.

MDA is the standard for software architecture developed by the Object Management Group (OMG), a consortium of over 700 companies across the world. Jha said that apart from cost savings which vary from 200 times to 1,500 times, the other benefit while going for MDA is the reduction in maintenance cost from 30-40 to 90 per cent.

Industry sources say that the major problem facing companies during the last few years is the continual introduction of new infrastructure technologies. "In the last 10 years, many a programming language like C, C++, Java, J2EE, Web Services and .NET have been introduced and nobody even knows what is going to emerge next year," said M S Udaya Ravi, partner manager of Compuware India Software Operations.

He said MDA's key benefit was that it transcended the implementation infrastructure at a higher level of abstraction (business level) that could be hosted on many different implementation infrastructures today and in the years to come.

"As a result, organisations only need to concern themselves with the architecture of an application, undistorted by technological details," he said.

The application model can be rehosted on multiple implementation infrastructures without having to rewrite all the application code individually.

MDA makes it possible by clearly separate the business model from the implementation platform, which helps developers to determine where to apply changes in the application, whether the business model, the architecture model or the code.

Looking at the demand for service oriented architecture and model-driven architecture, many a software company in India has started architecture service divisions. But the investment to built a team of 4-5 architects in India is around Rs 2-3 crore (depending upon the experience of the team members), which very few firms can afford, Jha said.

According to a survey conducted by Gartner, the architected, rapid application development (ARAD) approach which is built around model-driven architecture, can yield a return on investment (ROI) of up to 1,500 per cent.

ARAD is the approach which is used by Compuware OtimalJ, a model driven, pattern-based enterprise development solution provider, launched in 2001.

OptimalJ, a product-based on the MDA standard, helps an organisation build its software architecture and enterprise application much faster.