Quality Aspects in Model Driven Engineering

Foreword by the chairs

Model-driven engineering (MDE) refers to a range of approaches where models play an indispensable role in software development. Modeling promotes higher level of abstraction, therefore reducing complexity of software development and promoting communication among the several stakeholders in the development process (e.g. product managers, designers, programmers). MDE initiatives, like OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture

(MDA), make claims of increased quality and productivity by separating business and application logic from underlying platform technology, transforming models to

other models and automating code generation (ranging from system skeletons to complete, deployable products). However, while quality assurance is a well-known topic in

“traditional” Software Engineering, less is known on how to assess quality across the MDE lifecycle (encompassing new activities such as metamodel engineering or transformations specification), as well as on the effective improvements obtained by applying MDE itself, face to not using it at all. All aspects of research related to Quality of Model-Driven Engineering (QMDE) have been considered including both theoretical and empirical work.

This year seven papers were submitted to QMDE Thematic Track at QUATIC 2016. Finally, three papers have been selected for an acceptance rate of 42.8%.

1. Antonio Vallecillo, Carmen Morcillo, Priscill Orue. Expressing Measurement Uncertainty in Software Models. This paper describes an extension of the UML and OCL types to incorporate data uncertainty coming from physical measurements or user estimations into the models. A new UML and OCL type and the set of related operations to perform computations with its values have been proposed.

2. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovinoy, Alfonso Pierantonio. A Customizable Approach for the Automated Quality Assessment of Modelling Artefacts. This paper proposes a MDE approach for defining custom quality models consisting of hierarchically organized quality attributes and their metrics. A domain specific language is proposed to specify how quality attributes and metrics have to be aggregated. The applicability of the proposed approach is shown on some real metamodels and ATL transformations.

3. Davide Di Ruscio, Dimitrios S. Kolovos, Yannis Korkontzelos, Nicholas Matragkas, Jurgen Vinju. Supporting Custom Quality Models to Analyse and Compare Open-Source Software. This paper proposes a workflow and a tool chain to support the specification of

custom quality models, which can guide the automated analysis of open source software. The approach is presented on the OSSMETER quality metamodel.

Dr. Marjan Mernik received his M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maribor in 1994 and 1998 respectively. He is currently a professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Technical Sciences. His research interests include programming languages, compilers, domain-specific (modeling) languages, grammar-based systems, grammatical inference, and evolutionary computations. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and EAPLS. Dr. Mernik is the Editor-In-Chief of Computer Languages, Systems and Structures journal.

Jordi Cabot is an ICREA Research Professor at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya where he leads the SOM (Systems, Software and Models) Lab. Previously, he was leader of the AtlanMod team, an INRIA and LINA research group at École des Mines de Nantes (France), a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, a senior lecturer at the UOC (Open University of Catalonia) and a visiting scholar at the Politecnico di Milano. He received the BSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia.His research interests include software and systems modeling, model-driven and web engineering, formal verification and social aspects of software engineering. Apart from his scientific publications in international conferences and journals in these areas, he writes and blogs about all these topics in his Modeling Languages portal (http://modeling-languages.com).

Track Committee

Chair: Marjan Mernik, University of Maribor, Slovenia

Co-Chair: Jordi Cabot, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain

Program Committee:

Mauricio Alferez, INRIA, Rennes, France

Bruno Barroca, McGill University, Canada

Miroslav Bures, Czech Technical University

Antonio Cicchetti, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Michalis Famelis, University of Toronto, Canada

Jeff Gray, University of Alabama, USA

Jennifer Horkoff, City University, London, UK

Geylani Kardas, Ege University, Turkey

Alfonso Pierantonio, University of L'Aquila, Italy

Eugene Syriani, University of Montreal, Canada

Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Metacase, Finland

Antonio Vallecillo, Univ. Valencia, Spain

Manuel Wimmer, Technical University Vienna, Austria

Call for papers:

Model-driven engineering (MDE) refers to a range of approaches where models play an indispensable role in software development. Modeling promotes higher level of abstraction, therefore reducing complexity of software development and promoting communication among the several stakeholders in the development process (e.g. product managers, designers, programmers). MDE initiatives, like OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), make claims of increased quality and productivity by separating business and application logic from underlying platform technology, transforming models to other models and automating code generation (ranging from system skeletons to complete, deployable products). However, while quality assurance is a well-known topic in “traditional” Software Engineering, less is known on how to assess quality across the MDE lifecycle (encompassing new activities such as metamodel engineering or transformations specification), as well as on the effective improvements obtained by applying MDE itself, face to not using it at all.

We seek novel contributions ranging from conceptual frameworks to case studies on how to leverage ICT systems quality with MDE techniques, as well as how to induce quality assurance in the MDE lifecycle itself. Suggested topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

  • Quality models in the MDE context

  • Quality assurance in the MDE development flow

  • Evaluating the quality of models and metamodels

  • Models’ traceability throughout the lifecycle

  • Assessing quality in model transformations

  • Measuring the improvement achieved with an MDE approach, specially regarding quality

  • Quality in the context of model-driven service oriented systems

  • Case studies and lessons learned in applying MDE in industry

  • Empirical studies on the quality of MDE processes

  • Modeling and analyzing quality standards

  • Role of MDE in the quality evaluation of software maintenance, evolution and migration scenarios

The thematic track is associated with a Special Issue on Quality in Model-Driven Engineering (QMDE) at Computer Languages, Systems and Structures (COMLAN) by Elsevier, and provides an opportunity to have an open discussion and receive feedback in preparation for submission to that special issue (get the special issue CFP flyer here). Researchers considering submission to COMLAN special issue are strongly encouraged to submit their papers to the QUATIC'16 Thematic Track on Quality Aspects in Model Driven Engineering.

Submission process:

Authors should submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=quatic2016 a PDF version of their paper. Full Papers must be in CPS format and not exceed 6 pages, including figures, references, and appendices. Work In Progress (WIP) works with relevant preliminary results are limited to 3 pages. Submissions must be original and will be reviewed by the Track Program Committee. Accepted papers will be included in the electronic proceedings of QUATIC’2016 published by Conference Publishing Services (CPS), submitted for archiving in Xplore and CSDL, and submitted for indexing in ISI Web of Science, SCOPUS, ACM Portal, DBLP and DOI System, subject to one of the authors registering for the conference. The authors of the best papers of this thematic track will be invited to submit extended versions to the main track of the conference.

Important dates:

    • Paper submission: Sunday, April 17, May 15, 2016

    • Author's notifications: Sunday, May 15, June 12, 2016

    • Camera ready submission: Sunday, June 19, June 26, 2016

Previous Edition:

See details of the QUATIC 2014 edition of this track.