Automated quality assessment of interrelated modeling artifacts

Abstract

Over the last decade, several repositories have been proposed by the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community to enable the reuse of modeling artifacts and foster empirical studies to analyze specifications and tools made available by MDE researchers and practitioners. In this respect, different approaches have been proposed to measure the quality of, e.g., models, metamodels, and transformations, with respect to characteristics defined by quality models. However, when a modeling ecosystem is available, measuring the constituting artifacts singularly might not be enough. This paper proposes a quality assessment approach, which considers the relationships among the artifacts under analysis as part of the quality measurement process. For instance, to assess the quality of model transformations, further than measuring their structural characteristics, users might be interested in quality aspects like coverage and information loss related to the depending metamodels and the way models are consumed by transformations, respectively. The proposed approach is based on weaving models, which permit to link quality definitions of different kinds of artifacts, and it can generate Epsilon Object Language (EOL) programs by means of a model-to-code transformation to perform the specified quality assessment process.