On the Influence of Metamodel Design to Analyses and Transformations

Metamodels are a central artifact of model-driven engineering. As they determine the structure of instance models, they are a foundation for other model-driven artifacts such as model transformations, code generators or model analyses. Therefore, the quality of metamodels is important for any model-driven process. However, the implications of metamodel design to other artifacts such as model analyses or model transformations has barely been looked at through empirical research. In this paper, we present an empirical study where we analyzed equivalent model analyses and transformations for 19 different metamodels of the same domain. The results indicate that metamodel design has a strong influence to model analysis in terms of code metrics but only little influence on model transformations targeting this metamodel.

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