by Marcel Homolka, Luciano Marchezan, Wesley K. G. Assunção, Alexander Egyed
Abstract:
Metamodels, as any other software artifact, are expected to evolve. Consequently, the instances of those metamodels - aka the models - must evolve according to the changes made to the metamodels. This is commonly known as co-evolution and is a prominent research topic in Model Driven Engineering. However, co-evolution mostly adopts an all-or-nothing strategy and does not consider two important aspects, namely (i) recording the evolution history of a metamodel and (ii) allowing models to co-evolve at different times. We find that industrial co-evolution is commonly triggered by customer needs (the users of metamodels). For example, in the manufacturing domain, co-evolution tends to be tied to evolving hardware infrastructure. This implies that co-evolution is rarely dictated by the evolution of the metamodel but rather by the evolution needs of the models - and these evolution needs vary. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows engineers to record the history of a metamodel as versions and also create and maintain arbitrary models of those versioned metamodels, thus allowing engineers to co-evolve models at different times.
Reference:
"Don't Touch my Model!" Towards Managing Model History and Versions during Metamodel Evolution (Marcel Homolka, Luciano Marchezan, Wesley K. G. Assunção, Alexander Egyed), ACM, 2024.
Bibtex Entry:
@InProceedings{Homolka2024,
author = {Marcel Homolka and Luciano Marchezan and Wesley K. G. Assunção and Alexander Egyed},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 {ACM/IEEE} 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results, NIER@ICSE 2024, Lisbon, Portugal, April 14-20, 2024},
title = {"Don't Touch my Model!" Towards Managing Model History and Versions during Metamodel Evolution},
year = {2024},
pages = {77--81},
publisher = {{ACM}},
abstract = {Metamodels, as any other software artifact, are expected to evolve. Consequently, the instances of those metamodels - aka the models - must evolve according to the changes made to the metamodels. This is commonly known as co-evolution and is a prominent research topic in Model Driven Engineering. However, co-evolution mostly adopts an all-or-nothing strategy and does not consider two important aspects, namely (i) recording the evolution history of a metamodel and (ii) allowing models to co-evolve at different times. We find that industrial co-evolution is commonly triggered by customer needs (the users of metamodels). For example, in the manufacturing domain, co-evolution tends to be tied to evolving hardware infrastructure. This implies that co-evolution is rarely dictated by the evolution of the metamodel but rather by the evolution needs of the models - and these evolution needs vary. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows engineers to record the history of a metamodel as versions and also create and maintain arbitrary models of those versioned metamodels, thus allowing engineers to co-evolve models at different times.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icse/HomolkaMAE24.bib},
doi = {10.1145/3639476.3639758},
timestamp = {Fri, 31 May 2024 21:05:17 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3639476.3639758},
}