OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) has deeply influenced modern-day software development, not only by providing promising means for automating the software process, but also through revitalizing the role of modeling in software development, the importance of which had been neglected during the recent euphoria over lightweight development methods. However, MDA’s need to remain reasonably abstract means that it is more a software development approach rather than a standalone methodology, and therefore needs methodology support to be practically useful. Several MDA-based methodologies exist today, yet the need remains for the definition of an instantiable MDA-based development process. We propose a generic lifecycle for MDA-based software development that can be used as a basis for constructing MDA-based methodologies through a Method Engineering (ME) process. The phases and activities of the proposed lifecycle are described herein, with a number of prominent MDA-based methodologies assessed as to their degree of conformance to the proposed lifecycle.