Automating activities in MDE tools

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a victim of its own success: being able to quickly generate software tools, many modeling tools exist today, but their usability is far from efficient. Complex processes and repetitive tasks are often required to perform a modeling activity, such as creating a domain-specific language or creating a domain-specific model. The goal of this paper is to increase the productivity of modelers in their every day activities by automating the tasks they perform in current MDE tools. We propose an MDE-based solution where the user defines a workflow that can be parametrized at run-time and executed. Our solution works for frameworks that support two level metamodeling as well as deep metamodeling. We implemented our solution in the MDE tool AtoMPM. We also performed a preliminary empirical evaluation of our approach and showed that we reduce both mechanical and cognitive efforts of the user.