Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes

Résumé

When the last few years of software development evolution are analyzed, it can be observed that the technologies involved are increasingly focused on the definition of models for the specification of the intended software products. This model-centric development schema is the main ingredient for the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm. In general terms, the MDD approaches propose the automatic generation of software products by means of the transformation of the defined models into the final program code. This transformation process is also known as the model compilation process. Thus, MDD is oriented to reducing (or even eliminating) manual programming, which is both an error-prone and time-consuming task. Hence, models become the main actors of the MDD processes: the models are the new programming code. In this context, interoperability can be considered to be a natural trend for the future of model-driven technologies, where different developing and modeling approaches, tools, and standards can be integrated and coordinated to reduce the implementation and learning time of MDD approaches as well as to improve the quality of the final software products. However, there is a lack of approaches that provide a suitable solution to support interoperability in MDD processes. Moreover, the proposals that define an interoperability framework for MDD processes are still in a theoretical space, they are not aligned with current standards, other interoperability approaches, and existing technologies. Thus, the main objective of this doctoral thesis is to develop an approach to achieve the interoperability in MDD processes. This interoperability approach is based on current metamodeling standards, modeling language customization mechanisms, and model-to-model transformation technologies. To achieve this objective, novel approaches have been defined to improve the integration of modeling languages, to obtain a suitable interchange of modeling information, and to perform automatic interoperability verification. For the validation and verification of the proposed interoperability approach, empirical studies have been carried out to determine the completeness of the interoperability with regard to the modeling needs of the MDD processes involved. Also, the proposed interoperability approach has been applied to linking UML and the i* framework with an industrially-applied MDD approach. From these two interoperability scenarios, important feedback has been obtained to improve the approach proposed. These scenarios also show how to put in practice the results of this thesis and report interesting results for the MDD community.