Model Driven Architecture Is Not Really An Architecture Methodology

The perception that people have when they hear the term 'SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE' seems to cover a range of definitions, this is even obvious in job Ads.

Almost no two descriptions match, requiring different sort of skills, some more technically demanding and others leadership focused, and so on.

In turn the architectural design methodologies that are offered, try to solve different problems.

While researching about MDA, and reading a few books and articles, it seemed it is a way of designing a system, and has less to do with meeting the quality attributes along with functional requirements of a software.

It is about creating a model of the system in an abstract, platform ignorant way( Platform Independent Model, or PIM), possibly using a DSL(Domain Specific Language).

Models have levels (M1, M2,..) each lower model has more details added to it, this can be more business rules or more technical details (in memory call, remote call, database type, platform,..). 

Transformers are in charge of creating the lower level models form the higher level model, injecting more details, getting closer from abstract to concrete.

What seems to be missing is meeting the quality attributes.
Of course MDA does not stop you from achieving them, however it does not provide any guidelines to achieve this.


CONCLUSION:

Having in mind that design and architecture overlap,
MDA seems to be more of about design than architecture. It does not give you with guidelines  about how to achieve quality attributes. It focuses on models, model generators,... .

However, this claim, might be confusing, if we do not agree on a definition of 'SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE'.

You can find SEI's definition of software architecture and a few more here.