While engineering of embedded & real-time systems has moved much into the focus of the research community, being strongly promoted by those prominent application areas as the automotive, aerospace & defense, or telecommunications industry, small embedded & real-time systems, as they can be found in somehow marginal application areas as the industrial automation, are still treated a bit stepmotherly. In particular, profound methodical support for the software development of such small devices is almost unavailable. With MeDUSA we especially target the domain of such small embedded & real-time systems, and explicitly address the very special technological, economical, and organizational constraints that have to be faced in such marginal application areas.