Parastoo Mohagheghi (SINTEF, Norway)

For years, modeling has played an important role in software development by promoting higher levels of abstraction and providing sketches of what a software system must do or its design. Nowadays, industry tends to use models more and more for tasks other than describing the system, for example simulation and generating software through automatic transformation of models, as in the Model-Driven Engineering approach. The growing attention on using models in software development has subsequently brought the quality of models as a research area in forefront. However, while quality assurance is a well-known topic in “traditional” software engineering, less is known on how to assess quality across the MDE lifecycle (encompassing new activities such as metamodel engineering or transformations specification), as well as on the effective improvements obtained by applying MDE itself, face to not using it at all.

The thematic track on Quality in Model-Driven Engineering aims to provide a forum for presenting and discussing emerging issues related to software quality in the context of MDE. The indented result is to increase the body of knowledge in this specific area of software quality by providing a forum to exchange ideas and discuss state-of-the-art results.

In this thematic track, we have accepted four papers, which are concerned with the quality of models, transformations or software that is produced using a model-driven approach. In the first paper, Fernando Barros discusses improving the quality of software by promoting design reuse through a technique called inheritance by topology. This technique extends inheritance in object-oriented programming and allows starting with a base model and then adding or removing features to obtain new models, thus supporting software reuse and improving software quality and productivity.

In the second paper, Beatriz Marín, Giovanni Giachetti, Oscar Pastor and Tanja E. J. Vos present a tool for automatic defect detection in object-oriented conceptual models using a Functional Size Measurement (FSM) procedure called OOmCFP. This procedure, which is originally developed to measure the functional size of an application, has several rules that are used to review a conceptual model of an application, taking into account structural, behavioral and presentation constructs of the model. The detected defects are related to the consistency and correctness of models and several case studies show the superiority of the tool in detecting defects compared to reading techniques. The third paper by Ulrich Winkler, Mathias Fritzsche, Wasif Gilani and Alan Marshall discusses the impact of disruptions such as service outage on the economy or reputation of IT companies and the role of Business Continuity Management (BCM) in identifying potential threats, assessing business impacts and deciding responses to the threats. The authors propose a process-centric framework for BCM that is model-driven and uses a model refinement process that improves the quality of the analysis models and the analysis results. Finally, Patricia Roberts in the forth paper discusses the challenges of transforming data from an object-oriented model to a relational database which is still being widely used for storing persistent data of applications. The author argues that seamlessness should be considered as a quality requirement of transformations, which is improved by using object-relational databases.

The thematic track starts with a keynote by Michel Chaudron from Leiden University who has long research experience on the quality of architectures and designs that are described using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and has published extensively on the subject. The final discussions deal with future work and research interests of the participants.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors for their contributions, the program committee for their reviews, and the QUATIC 2010 conference organizers for their support in organizing the track.

• Chair - Parastoo Mohagheghi (SINTEF)
• Co-Chair - Neil Loughran (SINTEF)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - Sofia Azevedo (Univ. Minho)

• Michel Chaudron, Leiden University, The Netherlands
• Tony Clark, Middlesex University, United Kingdom
• Peter Fritzson, Linköping University, Sweden
• Marcela Fabiana Genero Bocco, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
• Wasif Gilani, SAP Research CEC Belfast, United Kingdom
• Ludwik Kuzniarz, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Richard Paige, University of York, United Kingdom
• Miroslaw Staron, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

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