Taming Model Round-Trip Engineering

Round-trip engineering is a challenging task that will become an important enabler for many Model-Driven Software Development approaches. Model round-trip engineering involves synchronizing models by keeping them consistent, thus enabling the software engineer to freely move between different representations. The vision of model round-trip engineering (MRTE) is only realized to a limited degree in Integrated Development Environments (IDE) nowadays, and it proves to be a very difficult problem to solve in general. In this paper, our goal is to clarify some of the issues in automating MRTE and point out some of the high-level qualities that are desirable for MRTE approaches to possess. Clarifying this domain is an important first step towards being able to automate round-trip engineering of models.