Conciliating model-driven engineering with technical debt using a quality framework

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to evaluate the feasibility to calculate the technical debt (a traditional software quality approach) in a model-driven context through the same tools used by software developers at work. The SonarQube tool was used, so that the quality check was performed directly on projects created with Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) instead of traditionals source code projects. In this work, XML was used as the model specification language to verify in Sonar- Qube due to the creation of EMF metamodels in XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and that SonarQube offers a plugin to assess the XML language. After this, our work focused on the definition of model rules as an XSD schema (XML Schema Definition) and the integration between EMF-SonarQube in order that these metrics were directly validated by SonarQube; and subsequently, this tool determined the technical debt that the analyzed EMF models could contain.