Despite lively debate over the last decade on the benefits or drawbacks of model-driven engineering (MDE), there have been very few industry-wide studies of MDE in practice. We present a new study, covering a broad range of experiences and ways of applying MDE: we surveyed 450 MDE practitioners
and carried out in-depth interviews with 22 more. Findings suggest that MDE may be more widespread than commonly believed, but developers rarely use it to generate whole systems; rather, they apply it to develop key parts of a system often using domain-specific modeling languages developed specifically for
the purpose. Our findings also suggest reasons why some efforts to adopt MDE fail and some succeed. As is usually the case in software engineering, adoption largely depends on social and organizational factors, some of which we describe in this paper.