Mining domain-specific edit operations from model repositories with applications to semantic lifting of model differences and change profiling

Model transformations are central to model-driven software development. Applications of model transformations include creating models, handling model co-evolution, model merging, and understanding model evolution. In the past, various (semi-)automatic approaches to derive model transformations from meta-models or from examples have been proposed. These approaches require time-consuming handcrafting or the recording of concrete examples, or they are unable to derive complex transformations. We propose a novel unsupervised approach, called Ockham, which is able to learn edit operations from model histories in model repositories. Ockham is based on the idea that meaningful domain-specific edit operations are the ones that compress the model differences. It employs frequent subgraph mining to discover frequent structures in model difference graphs. We evaluate our approach in two controlled experiments and one real-world case study of a large-scale industrial model-driven architecture project in the railway domain. We found that our approach is able to discover frequent edit operations that have actually been applied before. Furthermore, Ockham is able to extract edit operations that are meaningful—in the sense of explaining model differences through the edit operations they comprise—to practitioners in an industrial setting. We also discuss use cases (i.e., semantic lifting of model differences and change profiles) for the discovered edit operations in this industrial setting. We find that the edit operations discovered by Ockham can be used to better understand and simulate the evolution of models.