Toward a comparable characterization for software development activities in context of MDE

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) mixes up manual activities, like coding or modeling, with automated activities, such as transformation or generation steps, which can lead to constraints on the development process. Currently, we know little about such constraints. For gaining more knowledge about this it is necessary to capture and compare MDE activities from practice to identify reoccurring structures that can be associated to constraints on the software development process. However, current techniques to capture MDE activities are not sufficient for comparison. Therefore, we developed a new approach to characterize activities based on relations between consumed and produced artifacts. Further, we evaluated this approach by applying it to activities from industrial case studies. Thereby, we found that our approach is applicable to capture complex industrial activities and that the identification of reoccurring structures is possible. These results enable future research about the influence of MDE activities on software development processes.