ChainTracker, a model-transformation trace analysis tool for code-generation environments

Abstract

Model-driven engineering is advocated as an effective method for developing families of software systems that systematically differ across well defined dimensions. Yet, this software construction paradigm is rather brittle at the face of evolution. Particularly, when building code-generation environments, platform evolution scenarios force developers to modify the generated code of individual generation instances in an ad-hoc manner. Thus violating the systematicity of the original construction process. In order to maintain the code-generation environment synchronized, code refinements have to be traced and backwardly propagated to generation infrastructure, so as to make these changes systematically possible for all systems that can be generated. This paper presents ChainTracker, a general conceptual framework, and model-transformation composition analysis tool, that supports developers when maintaining and synchronizing evolving code-generation environments. ChainTracker gathers and visualizes model-to-model, and model-to-text traceability information for ATL and Acceleo model-transformation compositions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.