Towards the systematic measurement of ATL transformation models

Abstract

The Model-Driven Engineering paradigm is aimed at raising the abstraction level of Software Engineering approaches through the systematic use of models as primary artifacts, not only in software design and development, but also to understand, interact, configure, and modify the runtime behavior of software. It tries to overcome the wall between the documentation and the real state of the implementation. For that matter, our long-term goal seeks to reach a higher degree of interoperability among available metamodeling technologies through bridges among technological spaces (TS bridges). The proposed system provides several ATL (ATLAS Transformation Language) transformations that enable the application of measuring operations over ATL transformation models and rules, and the generation of different complementary end-user models, such as SVG charts and (X)HTML reports. For this work, we have evaluated a set of meta-modeling TS bridges among UML, MOF, Ecore, KM3, and Microsoft DSL Tools. These results provide quantitative measurements of the declarative and imperative constructs of these transformations and relative quality factors as well. In addition to this, all the top-level results extracted from the measurement of these TS bridges are merged into one unique model in order to assist in performing a comparative study among them. This comparative study suggests that it is feasible to apply automatic transformations over transformation models, i.e. meta-transformations. In this regard, there are many open research trends towards complete management, validation, optimization, and inference of TS bridges between complementary meta-modeling technologies.TOWARDS THE SYSTEMATIC MEASUREMENT OF ATL MODELS 791 for model-driven transformations and the overall system architecture. In Section 4, we discuss the most relevant results obtained from the measurement of the selected TS bridges. Finally, in Sections 5 and 6 we draw our main conclusions and our planned future work, respectively. MODELS AND TRANSFORMATION MODELSFigure 26. Pattern for MeasureMerge refining transformation.with the set of Java libraries for ATL and EMF; however, we have decided to use the ANT solution because it could be managed as an XML model in future versions, following the MDE vision. Related modeling metricsSome of the already identified potential extension points for our metrics (see Section 6) are the measurement of inheritance, coupling, effectiveness, and other quality factors, as seen in Metrics for Object-Oriented Design (MOOD [54] and MOOD2 [55]), Metrics for Object-Oriented Software Engineering (MOOSE [56] and EMOOSE [57]), and Quality Metrics for Object-Oriented Design (QMOOD [58]). These metrics have been defined with OCL constructs through the FLAME library [49]. In addition to this, these OCL definitions have been integrated into an available ATL use case entitled Models Measurement [38], which is the reference implementation of our proposed approach.The FLAME library was designed to support the calculation of different sets of object-o...

Mining metrics for understanding metamodel characteristics

“…However, the metrics used are elaborated for class diagram applied on metamodels, giving a very brief discussion on these results. In [17] the authors have focused on transformation model measurements in order to better understand transformations via a quantitative evaluation. The approach is applied to ATL and the proposed set of metrics are used to discover the declarative factor of modules and rules.…”

Applying Black-Box Testing to Model Transformations in the Model Driven Architecture Context

“…ATL is one of the most widely used model transformation languages (Tolosa et al, 2011). Besides being defined by an ATL module, the MT-PROAPES transformation was structured by means of transformation rules.…”

“…Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) is one of the most prominent among these languages, widely recognized as a solution for the development of model transformations (Tolosa et al, 2011;Troya and Vallecillo, 2011).…”

Model Refinement in the Model Driven Architecture Context

“…Such constructs allow expressing associations between the source model elements and the target model elements by means of an arrangement of rules. Additionally, imperative constructs enable the simplified specification of complex problems (Tolosa et al, 2011).…”

“…One of the most prominent among these languages is called Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) (Tolosa et al, 2011). ATL is widely recognized as a solution for the development of model transformations (Troya and Vallecillo, 2011).…”