Correct reuse of transformations is hard to guarantee

Abstract

As model transformations become more complex and more central to software development, reuse mechanisms become more important to enable effective and efficient development of high-quality transformations. A number of transformation-reuse mechanisms have been proposed, but so far there have been no effective attempts at evaluating the quality of reuse that can be achieved by these approaches. In this paper, we build on our earlier work on transformation intents and propose a systematic approach for analyzing the soundness and completeness of a given transformation reuse mechanism with respect to the preservation of transformation intent. We apply this approach to analyze transformation-reuse mechanisms currently proposed in the literature and show that these mechanisms are not sound or complete. We show why providing sound transformation reuse mechanisms is a hard problem, but provide some evidence that by limiting ourselves to specific families of transformations and modeling languages the problem can be simplified. As a result of our exploration, we propose a new research agenda into the development of sound (and possibly complete) transformation reuse mechanisms.