This paper presents an attempt, perhaps unorthodox, at bridging the gap between the use of formal techniques and the current software engineering practices. After years of full immersion in the development and use of formal techniques, we have been led to suggest aVirtuous Cycle philosophy, better marrying the rigour of formalities to the needs and, why not, the wisdom of current practices. What we have called Well-Founded Software Development Methods is a strategy compliant with that philosophy, that essentially aims at proposing methods where the formalities provide the foundational rigour, and perhaps may inspire new techniques, but are kept hidden from the user.

In a stream of papers we have outlined an approach — a possible instantiation of a particular well-founded method — which is Model-Driven and adopts a UML notation. Here, after introducing our basic philosophy and the Well-Founded methods strategy, we outline in summary our sample approach and, as a new contribution, we show in some detail how to handle the Model-Driven Design (or Platform Independent Design) phase.