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Using Workflows to Automate Activities in MDE Tools

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Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (MODELSWARD 2016)

Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) enables to generate software tools by systematically modeling and transforming this models. However, the usability of these tools is far from efficient. Common MDE activities, such as creating a domain-specific language, are non-trivial and often require repetitive tasks. This results in unnecessary increases of development time. 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 reusable 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 an empirical evaluation of our approach and showed that we reduce both mechanical and thinking efforts of the user. The ideas and concepts of this paper were introduced at the MODELSWARD conference [1] and are extended in this paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In [19], the authors proposed a deep metamodeling solution for the Modelverse of AToMPM, but no usable implementation was available at the time of writing this paper.

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Correspondence to Eugene Syriani .

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Gamboa, M.A., Syriani, E. (2017). Using Workflows to Automate Activities in MDE Tools. In: Hammoudi, S., Pires, L., Selic, B., Desfray, P. (eds) Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development. MODELSWARD 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 692. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66302-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66302-9_2

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