ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems

From 29 September 2013 through 4 October 2013 the ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems had taken place in Miami Beach.  MODELS  is the premier conference on model-based approaches in the development of software systems  with an acceptance rate averaging 20% in recent years. The conference series covers all aspects of model-based development for software and systems engineering, including modelling languages, methods, tools, and their applications.

Figure 1. Process for  impact  analysis on model transformation rules

This year Mondragon Univeristy Software engineering  and Web Development research team has participate in the 2nd Workshop on the Analysis of Model Transformations (AMT). The full paper titled Automatic Impact Analysis of Software Architecture Migration on Model Driven Software Development by Joseba Andoni Agirre, Leire Etxeberria and Goiuria Sagardui was presented. The central objective of the AMT workshop is to provide a forum for the discussion and exchange of innovative ideas for the analysis of model transformations. Another objective of the workshop is to clarify which transformation analysis problems can be solved with the help of existing analysis techniques and tools developed in the context of general-purpose programming languages and source code transformation languages, and which analysis problems require new approaches specific to model transformations. Analyses might support a variety of model transformation activities including the development, quality assurance, maintenance and evolution by facilitating, for instance,

• the detection of typing errors, anti-patterns, dead code, transformation slices, likely invariants, or performance bottlenecks
• the informal, semi-formal, or formal establishment of properties related to correctness or performance
• test suite evaluation through code coverage determination
• code completion and generation
• the evolution of metamodels
• impact analysis
• refactoring

The presented paper describes an approach and a tool for performing automated analysis of the impact of software architecture changes due to evolution, concretely software architecture migrations, on model driven code generation systems. The approach and the tool improve the process of managing and implementing the required changes in MDSD due to Software architecture changes. The tool concretely deducts  the transformation rules that must be modified and the changes that must be made in the transformation rules to adapt the MDSD system to software architecture migrations. The impact analysis tool is designed for MDSD systems that generate automatically code, but it can be used in any MDSD system that has a model to model (M2M) transformation.  To demonstrate the usefulness of the approach the tool has been applied to a MDSD system that generates ANSI-C code semi-automatically from UML models (a design based on UML2 components). The imapact analysis method, see figure ,  has been automated by a Java tool & EMF. The work shows that combining traceability information and output models differential it is possible to analyse the impact of evolution requirements for M2M transformations. The work has been developed by the  Mondragon University embedded system group supported by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government.