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Model transformations (MT), as with any other software artifact, may contain quality flaws. Even if a transformation is functionally correct, such flaws will impair maintenance activities such as enhancement and porting. The concept of technical debt (TD) models the impact of such flaws as a burden carried by the software which must either be settled in a 'lump sum' to eradicate the flaw, or paid in the ongoing additional costs of maintaining the software with the flaw. In this paper we investigate the characteristics of technical debt in model transformations, analysing a range of MT cases in different MT languages, and using measures of quality flaws or 'bad smells' for MT, adapted from code measures. Based on these measures we identify significant differences in the level and kinds of technical debt in different MT languages, and we propose ways in which TD can be reduced.

Verifying the consistency of model merging is an important step towards the support for team collaboration in software modeling and evolution. Since merging conflicts are inevitable, this has triggered intensive research on conflict management in different domains. Despite these efforts, techniques for high-level conflict representation have hardly been investigated yet. In this paper, we propose an approach to specify model merging conflicts. This approach includes the Conflict Pattern Language (CPL), a formalism for specifying conflicts in different modeling languages. CPL is based on the OCL grammar and is tooled by an editor and a parser. CPL facilitates the slow and error-prone task of specifying model merging conflicts and can be used to specify conflicts in any EMF-based model. We evaluated our approach with a case study, including five different conflict cases. The results are promising about how CPL can be used for specifying syntactic and semantic conflicts. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Specification languages; Formal language definitions.