Authors:
Georg Hinkel
1
and
Misha Strittmatter
2
Affiliations:
1
FZI Research Center of Information Technologies, Germany
;
2
Software Design & Quality Group, Germany
Keyword(s):
Metamodel, Modularity, Metric.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Domain-Specific Modeling and Domain-Specific Languages
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
MetaModeling
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Models
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
As model-driven engineering (MDE) gets applied for the development of larger systems, the quality assurance
of model-driven artifacts becomes more important. Here, metamodels are particularly important as many
other artifacts depend on them. However, existing metrics have been rarely validated for metamodels or,
even more, evaluation results disproved a correlation between these existing metrics and perceived metamodel
modularity. In this paper, we present a new entropy-based metric to capture the perception of metamodel
modularity and evaluate the metric in multiple case studies. In the case studies, we correlate the metric results
of 32 metamodels across three different domains with 164 responses of a quality assessment questionnaire
for which we collected responses in two empirical experiments. The results show significant and strong
correlations in all three domains between the metric results and the perceived metamodel modularity.