Uma abordagem para análise de impacto de mudanças em transformações de modelos.

Abstract

The main goal of the MDD (Model-Driven Development) approach is to change the focus from source code to models within the software development process. Elements that play important role in MDD are model transformations, i.e. rules that describe how source models should be used to automatically generate one or more target models. As any software project, MDD-based projects evolve along their lifecycle in such way that changes in their transformations are frequent. Before applying any change to a transformation, it is important to analyze how it would impact the whole project. However, there is currently no technique to help project managers or developers in this direction. The objective of this work is to propose an approach to analyze the impact of changes resulting from model transformations. Based on static analysis, the proposed approach aims at: (i)identifying the set of elements impacted with a change applied to a transformation; and (ii)measuring the impact of a change through a set of metrics. Among other benefits ,the proposed approach can help: (i)project managers to better prioritize and schedule changes, since they can estimate the costs to apply each of them; and (ii)developers to automatically identify all elements impacted with a change, thus saving effort and development time. A case study was conducted to identify new metrics and to evaluate the proposed approach regarding to the manual change impact analysis considering real transformations. This study revealed that the results obtained by using the proposed aproach and using the manual analysis were very similar. However, regarding effort and time, we observed that the results obtained from the proposed approach were superior than the manual analysis.