Maintaining Invariant Traceability through Bidirectional Transformations.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Maintaining Invariant Traceability through Bidirectional Transformations.
Authors:	Yijun Yu¹, Yu Lin², Zhenjiang Hu³, Hidaka, Soichiro³, Kato, Hiroyuki³, Montrieux, Lionel¹
Source:	ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering. Feb2012, p540-550. 11p.
Subjects:	Execution traces (Computer program testing), Computer software testing, Software configuration management, Computer software developers, Computer engineering
Abstract:	Following the "convention over configuration" paradigm, model-driven development (MDD) generates code to implement the "default" behaviour that has been specified by a template separate from the input model, reducing the decision effort of developers. For flexibility, users of MDD are allowed to customise the model and the generated code in parallel. A synchronisation of changed model or code is maintained by reflecting them on the other end of the code generation, as long as the traceability is unchanged. However, such invariant traceability between corresponding model and code elements can be violated either when (a) users of MDD protect custom changes from the generated code, or when (b) developers of MDD change the template for generating the default behaviour. A mismatch between user and template code is inevitable as they evolve for their own purposes. In this paper, we propose a two-layered invariant traceability framework that reduces the number of mismatches through bidirectional transformations. On top of existing vertical (model$code) synchronisations between a model and the template code, a horizontal (code$code) synchronisation between user and template code is supported, aligning the changes in both directions. Our blinkit tool is evaluated using the data set available from the CVS repositories of a MDD project: Eclipse MDT/GMF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Engineering Source

Description
Abstract:	Following the "convention over configuration" paradigm, model-driven development (MDD) generates code to implement the "default" behaviour that has been specified by a template separate from the input model, reducing the decision effort of developers. For flexibility, users of MDD are allowed to customise the model and the generated code in parallel. A synchronisation of changed model or code is maintained by reflecting them on the other end of the code generation, as long as the traceability is unchanged. However, such invariant traceability between corresponding model and code elements can be violated either when (a) users of MDD protect custom changes from the generated code, or when (b) developers of MDD change the template for generating the default behaviour. A mismatch between user and template code is inevitable as they evolve for their own purposes. In this paper, we propose a two-layered invariant traceability framework that reduces the number of mismatches through bidirectional transformations. On top of existing vertical (model$code) synchronisations between a model and the template code, a horizontal (code$code) synchronisation between user and template code is supported, aligning the changes in both directions. Our blinkit tool is evaluated using the data set available from the CVS repositories of a MDD project: Eclipse MDT/GMF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]