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In the last thirty years, the Software Engineering community has spent a tremendous effort in creating formal methods and tools for developing embedded systems, in particular, those with real-time constraints. Despite these efforts, most existing methods are still hard to scale up, and they require expensive testing efforts with no guarantees for bug-free products. Instead, systems engineers have often relied on modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques to improve the development task and obtain higher quality products. M&S-based testing is widely used for the early stages of a project; however, when the development tasks switch towards the target environment, early models are often abandoned. In order to deal with these issues, we introduce DEMES (Discrete-Event Modeling of Embedded Systems) an M&S-based development methodology based on discrete-event systems specifications. DEMES combines the advantages of a practical approach with the rigor of a formal method, in which one consistently use models throughout the development cycle.