Foreword of the Thematic Track: Quality in Model Driven Engineering

Abstract

ODEL-driven engineering (MDE) refers to a range of approaches where models play a core role in software development. Modeling promotes reasoning at higher level of abstraction, therefore reducing complexity of software development, while hiding the unnecessary low level details at appropriate stages, and promoting communication among the several stakeholders in the development process. MDE initiatives make claims of increased quality and productivity by separating business and application logic from underlying platform technology, transforming models to other models and automating code generation. 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. We should understand not only how to measure the quality of the MDE process (and determine if it is better than other approaches), but also to understand the quality of the models themselves (determining metrics for both models and metamodels’ quality, design patterns, and anti-patterns). All aspects of research related to Quality of Model-Driven Engineering have been considered including both theoretical and empirical work. To widely distributed call for papers sixteen papers were originally submitted to QMDE at QUATIC 2014. Finally, six papers were selected for an acceptance rate of 37.5%.