Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Why Was Mendix Founded?
1 Why Was Mendix Founded?
Why does this keep happening? It does not take long for Roald to realize that apparently he does not understand the
business, no matter how many lengthy documents are generated and long requirements meetings are held. Many
implicit assumptions exist on both the business and the IT side about how the software should work and the way it
should look. And even when there is perceived alignment, the next day, the customer's requirements change, either
consciously or unconsciously, which brings the whole process back to square one. Why can't the business simply make
up their minds about what they want? Determined to get to the root of this problem, Roald gets an MBA. It is during his
studies that he gets a full view on how large and how fundamental the gap actually is.
In any organization, people on the business side and people on the IT side think and act inherently differently. Unless
that gap is bridged, there is very little chance that any software project will be remotely successful.
Once validated, the actual coding becomes far less interesting, since the majority of thought process has happened
during the requirements and design phase.
Programming often involves many repetitive tasks, which in the end do not make any developer happy.
It is becoming harder to keep up to date with the rapidly evolving number of programming tools and languages
across the spectrum. It is virtually impossible for a single developer to be proficient in back-end tooling, front-end
tooling, database tooling, and the different operating systems at the same time. This makes developers highly
dependent on other people with specific skills, which adds significant lead time to the software development project.
Meanwhile, the two other founders of Mendix (Derek Roos and Derckjan Kruit) are experiencing the business-IT gap
from the opposite side – the business. They are asking the following questions:
At this point in the story, it is 2005, and Mendix is founded to bridge the business-IT gap and provide organizations and
people a whole new way of delivering and differentiating with innovative apps.
This is a new way, both in the technology used as well as in the process that is applied.
Abstraction – a software application model is defined on a higher abstraction level than in traditional coding
Automation – the model is then converted into a working application using automated transformations or
interpretations
The right MDD approach leverages model execution at runtime rather than generating code. The model is transformed
automatically into a working software application by interpreting and executing it. This removes the need to generate
code at all.
While this process can be applied to any software development project, the unique combination of fast and visual MDD
with an iterative Agile process speeds up the development hugely. At the same time, it ensures the customer will be
happy with the result, removing a lot of frustration and setting the customer up for success.
Mendix is full of people committed to helping companies win in a software-driven world by successfully bridging this
fundamental gap between business and IT.