Technical debt in MDE: a case study on GMF/EMF-based projects

Abstract

Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor referring to immature software artifacts that can hurt the long-term maintenance of a system. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a model-centric software development approach, which promises better maintainability. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the existence and influence of TD in the context of MDE. This paper investigates the code-level TD in MDE projects, which is incurred during code generation. We evaluated 16 open-source and non-trivial GMF/EMF-based MDE projects using bad smells, which are widely-accepted TD indicators. The results demonstrate that MDE is not TD-free, and code generators also incur TD, similarly to developers. In fact, the generated code usually contains more TD than handwritten code, which influences significantly the maintenance of MDE projects.