RefArch

Description: Many different languages (often defined by metamodels) exist to model the systems and reason on their quality. Such languages are mostly specific to quality properties, tools or development paradigms. Unfortunately, the creation of a specific model for any quality property of interest and any different tool used is simply infeasible. Current metamodels for quality modeling and analysis are often not designed to be extensible and reusable. Experience from generalizing and extending metamodels result in hard to evolve and overly complex metamodels. A systematic way of creating, extending and reusing metamodels for quality modeling and analysis, or parts of them, does not exist yet. When comparing metamodels for different quality properties, however, substantial parts show quite similar language features. This leads to our approach to define the first reference architecture for metamodels for quality modeling and analysis. We investigate the applicability of modularization concepts from object-oriented design and the idea of a reference architecture to metamodels for quality modeling and analysis to systematically create, extend and reuse metamodel parts.

Key References

Robert Heinrich, Misha Strittmatter, and Ralf Heinrich Reussner. A layered reference architecture for metamodels to tailor quality modeling and analysis. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 47(4):775–800, 2019, IEEE Computer Society.