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2011 modeling technologies and habits survey

This on-line survey took place in February 2011 and gathered 160 participants, most of them out of our existing contacts. The raw results are available here, and the following information is a summary of the survey. Feel free to use this information as long as you quote it is coming from PragmaDev.

Respondants profile

Respondant average profile is:
  • from Europe or Asia,
  • working in a large telecom company,
  • have less than 10 years experience,
  • the target platform is based on Linux or a RTOS,
  • the application is written in C or C++,
  • it is based on Finite State Machines and is object oriented.

Modeling technologies

The top three modeling technologies are UML, SDL, and Matlab. Even though UML is the first modeling technology to be quoted, it is also interesting to state that most of the respondants do not know if they are using a profile or not.

Modeling usage

Out of the 13 diagrams in UML the top 3 are:

  • Class diagram,
  • Use case diagram,
  • Sequence diagram.

Modeling usage

Modeling technologies are mostly used for documentation but the answers also show a strong usage of models for simulation, verification, code generation, and test. We believe it was difficult for the respondants to distinguish between the different answers such as We do simulation or We do model checking, and We generate skeletons or We generate all the code. So we applied a filter in order to feel the kind of usage for each of the top three modeling technology, and this is what came out:
  • UML users mostly do documentation (56%),
  • Matlab users mostly do simulation (57%),
  • SDL users mostly do code generation (40%).

Modeling usage

Upcoming technologies

This is probably one of the most interesting result we get out of this survey, and that gives an idea of the current trends on the modeling market. The key trends are:
  • UML is decreasing by 17%,
  • Matlab is decreasing by 15%,
  • SART is increasing by 121% (but the number of respondants is very small),
  • SysML is increasing by 86%,
  • AADL is increasing by 52%.

Modeling trends

Upcoming hot topics

Last question of the survey was about which topic will get the focus in the coming year. Top three answers are:

  • System modeling,
  • Software modeling,
  • Testing.

Upcoming topics