Adapting transformations to metamodel changes via external transformation composition
Evolution is inherent to software systemsbecause of the rapid improvement of technologies and business logic. As a software development paradigm, model driven engineering (MDE) is also affected by this problem. More concretely, being metamodels the cornerstone of MDE, their evolution impacts the rest of software artefacts involved in a development process, i.e., models and transformations. The influence over models has been tackled and partially solved in previous works. This paper focuses on the impact over transformations. We propose an approach to adapt transformations by means of external transformation composition. That is, we chain impacted transformations to particular adaptation transformations which deal with either refactoring/destruction changes or construction changes. Our approach semi-automatically generates such transformations by using the AtlanMod matching language, a DSL to define model matching strategies. To provide with a proof of concept for our proposal, we adapt transformations written in terms of object-relational database metamodels when such metamodels evolve in time.
model-driven engineering metamodel evolution transformation adaptation