A comparison of quality flaws and technical debt in model transformation specifications

Kolahdouz-Rahimi, Shekoufeh; Lano, Kevin; Sharbaf, Mohammadreza; Karimi, Mohammad; Alfraihi, Hessa

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2020.110684

Cited by 7 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The presence of certain design flaws or "bad smells" in the original transformation can suggest the need to use this pattern. In particular, a measure of excessive numbers of local variables (EPL in Kolahdouz-Rahimi et al 21 and Table 1) can indicate that a rule has excessive data complexity and should be refactored. The refactored rules will have reduced values for this measure and for measures of syntactic size.…”

Section: Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Formalizing model transformation patterns

Rouhi

Kolahdouz-Rahimi

Lano

2022

J Software Evolu Process

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Model transformation has become an established field, and it is important to improve the quality of specifications written in transformation languages. Different transformation patterns have been introduced in the model-driven engineering (MDE) community to improve the quality of transformation specifications. However, due to the different definitions of pattern concepts by different authors, it is difficult for practitioners to understand how to apply patterns in practice. Therefore, there is a need to unify transformation pattern concepts by presenting a generic metamodel and formalizing patterns in terms of this metamodel, to define the meaning of pattern application. In this research a general metamodel for definition of different design patterns in model transformation is provided. The metamodel presents clear description of common aspects of transformation patterns, which facilitates the application of patterns on model transformations by validating the application against the underlying formalism. Additionally, a unified and precise terminology for the application and verification of model transformation patterns by using a formal model of model transformation patterns in the Z notation is presented. To show the applicability of the proposed formalism, four well-known model transformation patterns are specified. K E Y W O R D S model-driven development (MDD), model transformation, design pattern, formal model 1 | INTRODUCTION Model transformations (MTs) have become more and more complex in recent years, as a result of their application to substantial problem cases in both academia and industry. Enhancing the quality of model transformations to provide a result in an efficient and modular way is a crucial task for the model-driven community. Design patterns for model transformations have been identified as an important solution to potentially improve the quality of model transformations. 1-3To obtain the benefit and utilize the productivity accompanied by the pattern application in MDE, model transformation patterns must first be formalized, which paves the way for automating the MT-based software development and verification. [3][4][5] Exploring the literature reveals some formal models for model transformations. [6][7][8] However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any formalism for model transformation patterns in the literature. Having a unified formalism regarding model transformation patterns will provide a foundation to support the pattern application and verification features easily in the current model transformation tools. 9,10 As a result, this research aims to present a new formalism for defining model transformation patterns and expressing the semantics of pattern application.To provide a conceptual view which serves as the informal basics of the proposed formalism of the MT patterns, an abstract architecture representing the underlying concepts such as model and metamodel is presented first. In this research, we use the Z specification language to formalize the MT design patterns. In a...

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Section: Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The existence of duplicated and redundant elements in these rules can result in duplicated work when they are modified, for example, in response to evolution of the metamodels. 2 The situation will exhibit the well-known bad smell of duplicated code or code clones (the DC measure in Kolahdouz-Rahimi et al 21 and Table 1).…”

Section: Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formalizing model transformation patterns

Rouhi

Kolahdouz-Rahimi

Lano

2022

J Software Evolu Process

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“…ETL has been designed based on the hybrid language style, which brings both declarative and imperative advantages (Kolahdouz-Rahimi et al, 2020;Kolovos et al, 2008). The rule-based execution scheme of ETL supports a task-specific rule definition for model-to-model transformation that can transform an arbitrary number of source models into an arbitrary number of target models.…”

Section: Epsilon Transformation Language (Etl)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental Model Transformation with Epsilon in Model-Driven Engineering

Ghorbani¹,

Sharbaf²,

Zamani³

2022

AIP

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Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software development paradigm that uses models as the main artifacts in the development process. MDE uses model transformations to propagate changes between source and target models. In some development scenarios, target models should be updated based on the evolution of source models. In such cases, it is required to re-execute all transformation rules to update the target model. Incremental execution of transformations, which partially executes the transformation rules, is a solution to this problem. The Epsilon Transformation Language (ETL) is a well-known model transformation language that does not support incremental executions. In this paper, we propose an approach to support the incremental execution of ETL transformations. Our proposal includes a process, as well as a prototype, to propagate changes to the target model. In the proposed approach, all the changes in the source model are detected to identify and re-execute the rules which deal with computing the required elements for updating the target model. We evaluated the correctness and performance of our approach by means of a case study. Compared to the standard ETL, the results are promising regarding the correctness of target models as well as faster execution of the transformation.

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“…The cases can be evaluated in terms of the quality metrics of [13,23] and in terms of the bx properties they support. Table 7 compares previous versions of the cases in QVT-R or ETL (for the tree to graph case) with the QVT-R and UML-RSDS versions defined in this paper, with regard to the number of quality flaws per LOC.…”

Section: Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing QVT-R via semantic interpretation in UML-RSDS

Lano

Kolahdouz-Rahimi

2020

Softw Syst Model

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The QVT-Relations (QVT-R) model transformation language is an OMG standard notation for model transformation specification. It is highly declarative and supports (in principle) bidirectional (bx) transformation specification. However, there are many unclear or unsatisfactory aspects to its semantics, which is not precisely defined in the standard. UML-RSDS is an executable subset of UML and OCL. It has a precise mathematical semantics and criteria for ensuring correctness of applications (including model transformations) by construction. There is extensive tool support for verification and for production of 3GL code in multiple languages (Java, C#, C++, C, Swift and Python). In this paper, we define a translation from QVT-R into UML-RSDS, which provides a logically oriented semantics for QVT-R, aligned with the RelToCore mapping semantics in the QVT standard. The translation includes variation points to enable specialised semantics to be selected in particular transformation cases. The translation provides a basis for verification and static analysis of QVT-R specifications and also enables the production of efficient code implementations of QVT-R specifications. We evaluate the approach by applying it to solve benchmark examples of bx.

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A comparison of quality flaws and technical debt in model transformation specifications

Cited by 7 publications

References 20 publications

Formalizing model transformation patterns

Formalizing model transformation patterns

Incremental Model Transformation with Epsilon in Model-Driven Engineering

Implementing QVT-R via semantic interpretation in UML-RSDS

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