A case study to evaluate templates & metadata for developing application families

Abstract

Automatic code generation of application families emerges as a solid promise to cope with the increasing demand of software in business environments. Using templates and metadata for development of abstract solutions and further automatic generation of the particular cases, helps freeing the developers from the most mechanical and tedious tasks of the implementation phase, allowing them to focus their knowledge in the expression of conceptual solutions. In this case study, we adapted the Halstead metrics for object-oriented code, templates, and metadata -in XML format- to measure the effort required to specify and then automatically generate complete applications, in comparison with the effort required to build the same applications entirely by hand. Then we used the same metrics to compare the effort of specifying and generating a second application of the same family, versus the effort required to coding this second application by hand. © 2007 Springer.