Quality in Model Driven Engineering

For years, modeling has played an important role in software development by promoting higher levels of abstraction and providing sketches of what a software system must do or its design. Nowadays, industry tends to use models more and more for tasks other than describing the system, for example simulation and generating software through automatic transformation of models, as in the Model-Driven Engineering approach. The growing attention on using models in software development has subsequently brought the quality of models as a research area in forefront. However, while quality assurance is a well-known topic in “traditional” software engineering, less is known on how to assess quality across the MDE lifecycle (encompassing new activities such as metamodel engineering or transformations specification), as well as on the effective improvements obtained by applying MDE itself, face to not using it at all.