Model Driven Development (MDD) is the next step of abstraction in writing software applications. In the history of computing, each higher level of abstraction has offered improved productivity and ease-of-writing applications. This has enabled the creation of far more complex applications without increasing the project management work load, or conversely, building like-for-like applications faster, cheaper, and with higher quality, compared with lower-level techniques.

Thus with MDD there is a separation of the model from the code, the user works on a platform independent model, selects the specific target platform, and the tool generates the code. Productivity is raised because the auto-generation takes care of all the plumbing code. There is also only a single language to use in building the model, the auto-generation will take care of SQL database calls, Java or .NET platform specific code, XML, and JavaScript for Web clients etc. This makes it easier to rapidly build applications and avoid the code testing cycle, as code is 100% generated. Naturally, testing still needs to be performed to test the design against the project requirements (and in mature testing environments the requirements are also tested).