Automating Change Evolution in Model-Driven Engineering.pdf

0018-9162/06/$20.00 ? 2006 IEEE February 2006 51P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y C O V E R F E A T U R E thousands of elements requires a staggering amount of clicking and typing within the modeling tool. The ad hoc nature of this process causes errors, such as forget- ting to make a connection between two replicated ele- ments. Clearly, manual scaling affects not only modeling performance, but also the representation’s correctness. Both these change evolution categories would benefit greatly from automation. To this end, we have devel- oped the Constraint-Specification Aspect Weaver, a gen- eralized transformation engine for manipulating models. C-Saw is a plug-in for Vanderbilt University’s Generic Modeling Environment (GME)—a configurable toolset that supports the creation of domain-specific modeling environments (/Projects/gme). In “Developing Applications Using Model-Driven Design Environments” on pp. 33-40, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian and coauthors describe a GME appli- cation. To address crosscutting changes, C-Saw incor- porates several aspect-oriented principles.4 The combination of model transformation and aspect weaving provides a powerful technology for rapidly transforming legacy systems from the high-level prop- erties that models describe. Further, by applying aspect- oriented techniques and program transformation, small changes at the modeling level can trigger very large transformations at the source code level. Thus, model engineers can explore alternative configurations using an aspect weaver targeted for modeling tools and then use the models to generate program transformation rules for adapting legacy source code on a wide scale. The escalating complexity of software and system models is making it difficult to rapidly explore the effects of a design decision. Automating such exploration with model transformation and aspect-oriented techniques can improve both productivity and model quality. Jeff Gray, Y