Jordi Cabot

Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice: Second Edition

This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence of software development and business analysis. The aim of this book is to provide you with an agile and flexible tool to introduce you to the MDSE world, thus allowing you to quickly understand its basic principles and techniques and to choose the right set of MDSE instruments for your needs so that you can start to benefit from MDSE right away. The book is organized into two main parts. The first part discusses the foundations of MDSE in terms of basic concepts (i.e., models and transformations), driving principles, application scenarios, and current standards, like the well-known MDA initiative proposed by OMG (Object Management Group) as well as the practices on how to integrate MDSE in existing development processes. The second part deals with the technical aspects of MDSE, spanning from the basics on when and how to build a domain-specific modeling language, to the description of Model-to-Text and Model-to-Model transformations, and the tools that support the management of MDSE projects. The second edition of the book features: a set of completely new topics, including: full example of the creation of a new modeling language (IFML), discussion of modeling issues and approaches in specific domains, like business process modeling, user interaction modeling, and enterprise architecture complete revision of examples, figures, and text, for improving readability, understandability, and coherence better formulation of definitions, dependencies between concepts and ideas addition of a complete index of book content In addition to the contents of the book, more resources are provided on the books website http://www.mdse-book.com, including the examples presented in the book.

The MegaM@Rt2 ECSEL project: MegaModelling at Runtime – Scalable model-based framework for continuous development and runtime validation of complex systems

Abstract A major challenge for the European electronic industry is to enhance productivity by ensuring quality of development, integration and maintenance while reducing the associated costs. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) principles and techniques have already shown promising capabilities, but they still need to scale up to support real-world scenarios implied by the full deployment and use of complex electronic components and systems. Moreover, maintaining efficient traceability, integration, and communication between two fundamental system life cycle phases (design time and runtime) is another challenge requiring the scalability of MDE. This paper presents an overview of the ECSEL 1 project entitled “MegaModelling at runtime – Scalable model-based framework for continuous development and runtime validation of complex systems” (MegaM@Rt2), whose aim is to address the above mentioned challenges facing MDE. Driven by both large and small industrial enterprises, with the support of research partners and technology providers, MegaM@Rt2 aims to deliver a framework of tools and methods for: 1) system engineering/design and continuous development, 2) related runtime analysis and 3) global models and traceability management. Diverse industrial use cases (covering strategic domains such as aeronautics, railway, construction and telecommunications) will integrate and demonstrate the validity of the MegaM@Rt2 solution. This paper provides an overview of the MegaM@Rt2 project with respect to its approach, mission, objectives as well as to its implementation details. It further introduces the consortium as well as describes the work packages and few already produced deliverables.

Robust Hashing for Models

The increased adoption of model-driven engineering (MDE) in complex industrial environments highlights the value of a companys modeling artefacts. As such, any MDE ecosystem must provide mechanisms to both, protect, and take full advantage of these valuable assets. In this sense, we explore the adaptation of the Robust Hashing technique to the MDE domain. Indeed, robust hashing algorithms (i.e. hashing algorithms that generate similar outputs from similar input data), have been proved useful as a key building block in intellectual property protection, authenticity assessment and fast comparison and retrieval solutions for different application domains. We present a novel robust hashing mechanism for models based on the use of model fragmentation and locality sensitive hashing. We discuss the usefulness of this technique on a number of scenarios and its feasibility by providing a prototype implementation and corresponding experimental evaluation.

The role of foundations in open source projects

In the last years, a number of Open-Source Systems (OSS) have created parallel foundations, as legal instruments to better articulate the structure, collaboration and financial model for the project. Some examples are Apache, Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse or Django foundations. Nevertheless, foundations largely differ in the kind of mission they have and the support they provide to their project/s. In this paper we study the role of foundations in open source software development. We analyze the nature of 89 software foundations and then focus on the 18 most relevant ones to study their openness and influence in the development practices taking place in the endorsed projects. Our results reveal the existence of a significant number of foundations with the sole purpose of promoting the importance of the free software movement and/or that limit themselves to core legal aspects but do not play any role in the day-to-day operations of the project (e.g., a few of them are just umbrella organizations for a large variety of projects). Therefore, while useful, foundations do not remove the need for specific projects to develop their own governance, contribution and development policies.

Enabling Performance Modeling for the Masses: Initial Experiences

Performance problems such as sluggish response time or low throughput are especially annoying, frustrating and noticeable to users. Fixing performance problems after they occur results in unplanned expenses and time. Our vision is an MDE-intensive software development paradigm for complex systems in which software designers can evaluate performance early in development, when the analysis can have the greatest impact. We seek to empower designers to do the analysis themselves by automating the creation of performance models out of standard design models. Such performance models can be automatically solved, providing results meaningful to them. In our vision, this automation can be enabled by using model-to-model transformations: First, designers create UML design models embellished with the Modeling and Analysis of Real Time and Embedded systems (MARTE) design specifications; and secondly, such models are transformed to automatically solvable performance models by using QVT. This paper reports on our first experiences when implementing these two initial activities.

Are CS conferences (too) closed communities

Assessing whether newcomers have a more difficult time achieving paper acceptance at established conferences.

Towards a UML and IFML Mapping to GraphQL

Web APIs have become first-class citizens on the Web, in particular, to provide a more unified access to heterogeneous data sources that organizations want to make publicly available. While REST APIs have become the norm to structure web APIs, they can be regarded as a server-side solution, offering default limited query capabilities and therefore forcing developers to implement ad-hoc solutions for clients requiring to perform complex queries on the data. Lately, GraphQL has gained popularity as a way to simplify this work. GraphQL is a query language for Web APIs specially designed to build client applications by providing an intuitive and flexible syntax for describing their data schema, requirements and interactions. In this paper we propose an approach for the generation of GraphQL schemas from UML class diagrams and IFML interaction models, two well-known standard modeling languages in the web engineering field, to facilitate the creation of web applications relying on this new GraphQL paradigm following a model-based approach. While UML is used to generate the GraphQL schema, IFML is used to derive the set of queries and modifications to be performed on that schema.

Cognifying Model-Driven Software Engineering

The limited adoption of Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) is due to a variety of social and technical factors, which can be summarized in one: its (real or perceived) benefits do not outweigh its costs. In this vision paper we argue that the cognification of MDSE has the potential to reverse this situation. Cognification is the application of knowledge (inferred from large volumes of information, artificial intelligence or collective intelligence) to boost the performance and impact of a process. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of cognifying MDSE tasks and we describe some potential scenarios where cognification can bring quantifiable and perceivable advantages. And conversely, we also discuss how MDSE techniques themselves can help in the improvement of AI, Machine learning, bot generation and other cognification techniques.