Towards Measuring the Change Impact in ATL Model Transformations

The Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach shifts the focus on code to models in the software development process. In MDD, model transformations are elements that play an important role. MDD-based projects evolve along their lifecycle in a way that changes in their transformations are frequent. Before applying changes it is important to measure their impacts within the transformation. However, currently no technique helps practitioners in this direction. We propose an approach to measure the change impact in ATL model transformations. Based on static analysis, it detects the elements impacted by a change and calculates the change impact value through three metrics we defined. By using our approach, practitioners can (i) save effort and development time since the elements impacted with the change are automatically detected and (ii) better schedule and prioritize changes according to the impact value. To empirically evaluate our approach we conducted a case study.