The advent of increasingly complex and dynamic ecosystems, such as digital twins (DT), smart cities and Industry 4.0 and 5.0, has made evident the need to include modeling and simulation (M&S) in the software development life cycle. Such disruptive systems include simulation models in their own architecture (such as DT) or require the use of simulation models to represent the high degree of movement and the multiplicity of interactions that occur between the involved systems. However, when software engineers (particularly the newcomers) need to use M&S in their projects, they often pose themselves an important question: which formalism should I use? In this direction, the main contribution of this paper is the establishment of a preliminary checklist with questions to assist beginners in M&S in choosing the most appropriate paradigm to solve their problems. The checklist is based on three main formalisms: DEVS, System Dynamics and Agent-Based Simulation. A pilot study was carried out and an expert was consulted. The preliminary results show (i) conformance between the suggestion given by the checklist and the formalism selected in the original studies used as input for evaluating the checklist, and (ii) a positive feedback from the expert.

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