An Exploratory Experiment on Metamodel-Transformation Co-Evolution

Metamodels, like any other software artifacts evolve throughout time. As a consequence, all dependent artifacts may need to be co-evolved accordingly, including model transformations. Transformations are a key component of an automated development solution, thus it is crucial to automate their co-evolution while guaranteeing that they remain correct. However, there is little known about what aspects and characteristics must be automated in a manual co-evolution and in particular how it should be correctly automated. Few approaches exist, but it is not clear to what extent those approaches are able to automate the manual co-evolution of model transformations. In this paper, we report on an exploratory experiment we conducted to better understand the co-evolution of transformations in practice and to assess the usefulness of the current existing techniques. 15 participants were involved in our experiment to monitor how they co-evolve transformation rules in response to metamodel evolution. Our analysis results show that while existing approaches support the user with an automatic impact analysis, they do not consider proposing a very large spectrum of alternative resolutions. Among the 14 resolutions that occurred in our experiment, on average only 4 (up to 6) were supported by the existing approaches.