A tool environment for managing families of model transformation rules

Abstract

Model transformation systems often contain families of rules that are substantially similar to each other. Variability-based rules are a recent approach to express such families of rules in a compact representation, enabling the convenient editing of multiple rule variants at once. On the downside, this approach gives rises to distinct maintenance drawbacks: Users are required to view and edit presence conditions. The complexity and size of the resulting rules may impair their readability. In this paper, we propose to facilitate the editing of variability-based rules through suitable tool support. Inspired by the paradigms of filtered editing and virtual seperation of concerns, we present a tool environment that offers editable views for variants expressed in a variability-based rule. We demonstrate that our tool environment is helpful to address the identified issues, rendering variability-based rules a highly feasible reuse approach.