Evaluating Maintainability of MDA Software Process Models

摘要

The description of a software process is called a process model. As well as traditional software processes/methods (e.g. RUP, XP, OSDP, etc.) an MDA software process requires the selection of metamodels and mapping rules for the generation of the transformation chain that produces models and application code. Before software process enactment, process models should be evaluated in order to improve some quality attributes and maintainability is one of the main factors for software process reuse and improvement. This paper presents a conceptual framework including a metrics suite to evaluate maintainability of MDA process models. We also describe an empirical assessment involving three case studies where the metrics suite was applied to over five MDA process models. We compared the results indicated by the measurements with software engineer opinions surveyed by an online questionnaire. We found that the results from the metrics-based conceptual framework application match software engineers' perceptions.