Model/code co-refactoring: An MDE approach

Model-driven engineering suggests that models are the primary artefacts of software development. This means that models may be refactored even after code has been generated from them, in which case the code must be changed to reflect the refactoring. However, as we show neither re-generating the code from the refactored model nor applying an equivalent refactoring to the generated code is sufficient to keep model and code in sync - rather, model and code need to be refactored jointly. To enable this, we investigate the technical requirements of model/code co-refactoring, and implement a model-driven solution that we evaluate using a set of open-source programs and their structural models. Results suggest that our approach is feasible.