Towards the systematic measurement of ATL transformation models

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 meta-modeling 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. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.