Maintenance of specification models in industry using Edapt

Abstract

Domain specific languages (DSLs) ease the adoption of formal specification in industry. They allow developers to describe their specification models in concepts of their domain. However, DSLs evolve over time, causing specification models to have to co-evolve to reflect the evolution in the DSL. The maintenance overhead introduced by these, often manual, changes to specification models threatens to overshadow the advantages of DSL usage in industry. To this extent, many approaches have been proposed in the literature to facilitate DSL maintenance by automating model co-changes. In this paper, we evaluate the ability of a tool, Edapt, to support the change and co-change in twenty-two industrial DSLs and corresponding specification models over a maintenance period of four years. We observe that the tool is only able to automatically co-change specification models for 72% of the DSL changes. To address the remaining 28% of the changes, we extend Edapt. The resulting extension allows automatically co-changing specification models for 98% of the DSL changes.