Where does model-driven engineering help? Experiences from three industrial cases

There have been few experience reports from industry on how Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is applied and what the benefits are. This paper summarizes the experiences of three large industrial participants in a European research project with the objective of developing techniques and tools for applying MDE on the development of large and complex software systems. The participants had varying degrees of previous experience with MDE. They found MDE to be particularly useful for providing abstractions of complex systems at multiple levels or from different viewpoints, for the development of domain-specific models that facilitate communication with non-technical experts, for the purposes of simulation and testing, and for the consumption of models for analysis, such as performance-related decision support and system design improvements. From the industrial perspective, a methodology is considered to be useful and cost-efficient if it is possible to reuse solutions in multiple projects or products. However, developing reusable solutions required extra effort and sometimes had a negative impact on the performance of tools. While the companies identified several benefits of MDE, merging different tools with one another in a seamless development environment required several transformations, which increased the required implementation effort and complexity. Additionally, user-friendliness of tools and the provision of features for managing models of complex systems were identified as crucial for a wider industrial adoption of MDE.     

An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools

MDD tools are very useful to draw conceptual models and to automate code generation. Even though this would bring many benefits, wide adoption of MDD tools is not yet a reality. Various research activities are being undertaken to find why and to provide the required solutions. However, insufficient research has been done on a key factor for the acceptance of MDD tools: usability. With the help of end-users, this paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of MDD tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry. To illustrate the applicability of our framework, we instantiated it for performing a usability evaluation of a tool named INTEGRANOVA. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of the study with another usability evaluation technique based on ergonomic criteria.     

Quality in model-driven engineering: a tertiary study

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is believed to have a significant impact in software quality. However, researchers and practitioners may have a hard time locating consolidated evidence on this impact, as the available information is scattered in several different publications. Our goal is to aggregate consolidated findings on quality in MDE, facilitating the work of researchers and practitioners in learning about the coverage and main findings of existing work as well as identifying relatively unexplored niches of research that need further attention. We performed a tertiary study on quality in MDE, in order to gain a better understanding of its most prominent findings and existing challenges, as reported in the literature. We identified 22 systematic literature reviews and mapping studies and the most relevant quality attributes addressed by each of those studies, in the context of MDE. Maintainability is clearly the most often studied and reported quality attribute impacted by MDE. Eighty out of 83 research questions in the selected secondary studies have a structure that is more often associated with mapping existing research than with answering more concrete research questions (e.g., comparing two alternative MDE approaches with respect to their impact on a specific quality attribute). We briefly outline the main contributions of each of the selected literature reviews. In the collected studies, we observed a broad coverage of software product quality, although frequently accompanied by notes on how much more empirical research is needed to further validate existing claims. Relatively, little attention seems to be devoted to the impact of MDE on the quality in use of products developed using MDE.     

User participation in the requirements engineering process: An empirical study

In the development of information systems, user participation in the requirements engineering (RE) process is hypothesised to be necessary for RE success. In this paper we develop a theoretical model which predicts that the interaction between user participation in the RE process and uncertainty has an impact on RE success. This theory is empirically tested using survey data. We develop instruments to measure user participation and uncertainty. An existing instrument for measuring RE success was used. This instrument covers two dimensions of RE success: (a) the quality of RE service, and (b) the quality of RE products. The results, indicate that as uncertainty increases, greater user participation alleviates the negative influence of uncertainty on the quality of RE service, and that as uncertainty decreases, the beneficial effects on the quality of RE service of increasing user participation diminish. Furthermore, we did not find that the interaction between user participation and uncertainty had an impact on the quality of RE products. Based on these results, we make recommendations for managing user participation in the RE process, and provide directions for future research.This work has been supported, in part, by the IT Macroscope Project and NSERC Canada.     

An empirical examination of patient-physician portal acceptance

Healthcare providers have recently begun deploying Internet-based patient–physician portals. These applications allow patients to both communicate with their providers and access personal medical information, such as laboratory results. Research within medical informatics explores, and debates, the utility of such functions from the patient and physician perspectives. However, work does not examine factors influencing patient use, assuming that once built and deployed patients will come. Hence, the current research empirically investigates patient behavioral intentions (BI) with respect to (a) use of electronic communications functions and (b) accessing of individual medical information through an Internet-based patient–physician portal. Surveying 294 patients, this work incorporates individual factors, namely computer self-efficacy and personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology, with technology-based factors identified in the Technology Acceptance Model. The analysis finds that usefulness and innovativeness have a positive direct effect on BI with respect to both functions, namely communications and information access. Additionally, patients with greater healthcare needs foresee increased use of portals to access their personal medical information. Finally, patients in primary care, as opposed to specialist, provider settings intend to engage in electronic communications.     

Factors that motivate software engineering teams: A four country empirical study

Motivation, although difficult to quantify, is considered to be the single largest factor in developer productivity; there are also suggestions that low motivation is an important factor in software development project failure. We investigate factors that motivate software engineering teams using survey data collected from software engineering practitioners based in Australia, Chile, USA and Vietnam. We also investigate the relationship between team motivation and project outcome, identifying whether the country in which software engineering practitioners are based affects this relationship. Analysis of 333 questionnaires indicates that failed projects are associated with low team motivation. We found a set of six common team motivational factors that appear to be culturally independent (project manager has good communication with project staff, project risks reassessed, controlled and managed during the project, customer has confidence in the project manager and the development team, the working environment is good, the team works well together, and the software engineer had a pleasant experience). We also found unique groupings of team motivational factors for each of the countries investigated. This indicates that there are cultural differences that project managers need to consider when working in a global environment.     

An empirical study on the integrative pre-implementation model of technology acceptance in a mandatory environment

Technology acceptance has been studied extensively within the IS discipline. Few, if any, have studied end users’ acceptance of newly implemented technologies within organisational contexts before end users start using the technology. Thus, by integrating variables from multiple relevant literature, this research attempts to answer this research question: will the introduction of a richer model for technology acceptance in a mandatory adoption environment, specifically in the pre-implementation phase, allow us to capture and account for the complexities of organisational technology implementations? The research model was tested in an organisational setting where a new content management system was being implemented. A total of 148 employees participated in this survey and partial least squares method was used to analyse the data to test the model. Implementation climate, valence, attitude, and perceived ease of use positively influence goal commitment to technology acceptance in a mandatory environment, and the model has displayed relatively large explanatory and predictive power. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the paper.     

Preprocessor-based variability in open-source and industrial software systems: An empirical study

Almost every sufficiently complex software system today is configurable. Conditional compilation is a simple variability-implementation mechanism that is widely used in open-source projects and industry. Especially, the C preprocessor (CPP) is very popular in practice, but it is also gaining (again) interest in academia. Although there have been several attempts to understand and improve CPP, there is a lack of understanding of how it is used in open-source and industrial systems and whether different usage patterns have emerged. The background is that much research on configurable systems and product lines concentrates on open-source systems, simply because they are available for study in the first place. This leads to the potentially problematic situation that it is unclear whether the results obtained from these studies are transferable to industrial systems. We aim at lowering this gap by comparing the use of CPP in open-source projects and industry—especially from the embedded-systems domain—based on a substantial set of subject systems and well-known variability metrics, including size, scattering, and tangling metrics. A key result of our empirical study is that, regarding almost all aspects we studied, the analyzed open-source systems and the considered embedded systems from industry are similar regarding most metrics, including systems that have been developed in industry and made open source at some point. So, our study indicates that, regarding CPP as variability-implementation mechanism, insights, methods, and tools developed based on studies of open-source systems are transferable to industrial systems—at least, with respect to the metrics we considered.     

Supporting the verification of compliance to safety standards via model-driven engineering: Approach,tool-support and empirical validation

ContextMany safety–critical systems are subject to safety certification as a way to provide assurance that these systems cannot unduly harm people, property or the environment. Creating the requisite evidence for certification can be a challenging task due to the sheer size of the textual standards based on which certification is performed and the amenability of these standards to subjective interpretation.ObjectiveThis paper proposes a novel approach to aid suppliers in creating the evidence necessary for certification according to standards. The approach is based on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and addresses the challenges of using certification standards while providing assistance with compliance.MethodGiven a safety standard, a conceptual model is built that provides a succinct and explicit interpretation of the standard. This model is then used to create a UML profile that helps system suppliers in relating the concepts of the safety standard to those of the application domain, in turn enabling the suppliers to demonstrate how their system development artifacts comply with the standard.ResultsWe provide a generalizable and tool-supported solution to support the verification of compliance to safety standards. Empirical validation of the work is presented via an industrial case study that shows how the concepts of a sub-sea production control system can be aligned with the evidence requirements of the IEC61508 standard. A subsequent survey examines the perceptions of practitioners about the solution.ConclusionThe case study indicates that the supplier company where the study was performed found the approach useful in helping them prepare for certification of their software. The survey indicates that practitioners found our approach easy to understand and that they would be willing to adopt it in practice. Since the IEC61508 standard applies to multiple domains, these results suggest wider applicability and usefulness of our work.     

An empirical study of relationships among extreme programming engineering activities

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile software process that promotes early and quick production of working code. In this paper, we investigated the relationship among three XP engineering activities: new design, refactoring, and error fix. We found that the more the new design performed to the system the less refactoring and error fix were performed. However, the refactoring and error fix efforts did not seem to be related. We also found that the error fix effort is related to number of days spent on each story, while new design is not. The relationship between the refactoring effort and number of days spent on each story was not conclusive.     

The motivational and control structure underlying the acceptance of adaptive museum guides – An empirical study

Acceptance of adaptive museum guides raises important issues stemming from both the nature of the scenario (museum visit) and the very kind of technological approach adopted (adaptivity). As to the former, museum guides play a utilitarian role in a hedonic scenario; at present, however, it is not clear how this reflects on the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for guide acceptance. The adaptive nature of the guide, in turn, raises questions about the impact of the opaqueness of the system behavior, of the alleged loss of perceived control over the interaction, and the role of presentation personalization. All these issues are explored in this paper by means of a model derived from TAM and comprising both extrinsic and intrinsic motivational constructs. The results of a analysis of data from 115 subjects show that the motivational structure of the guide usage is mainly utilitarian, with intrinsic motivations playing a role insofar as they acquire an instrumental value. The impact of the control issues on acceptability is low and indirect, while the importance of the feedback provided by the system is confirmed. Finally, personalization positively impacts on user engagement, this way strengthening the empirical and theoretical groundings for work in adaptive systems.     

On the application of model-driven engineering in data reengineering

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) emphasizes the systematic use of models to improve software productivity and some aspects of the software quality such as maintainability or interoperability. Model-driven techniques have proven useful not only as regards developing new software applications but also the reengineering of legacy systems. Models and metamodels provide a high-level formalism with which to represent artefacts commonly manipulated in the different stages of a software evolution process (e.g., a software migration) while model transformation allows the automation of the evolution tasks to be performed. Some approaches and experiences of model-driven software reengineering have recently been presented but they have been focused on the code while data reengineering aspects have been overlooked. The objective of this work is to assess to what extent data reengineering processes could also take advantage of MDE techniques.The article starts by characterising data-reengineering in terms of the tasks involved. It then goes on to state that MDE is particularly amenable as regards addressing the tasks previously identified. We present an MDE-based approach for the reengineering of data whose purpose is to improve the quality of the logical schema in a relational data migration scenario. As a proof of concept, the approach is illustrated for two common problems in data re-engineering: undeclared foreign keys and disabled constraints. This approach is organised following the three stages of a software reengineering process: reverse engineering, restructuring and forward engineering. We show how each stage is implemented by means of model transformation chains. A running example is used to illustrate each stage of the process throughout the article. The approach is validated with a real widely-used database. An assessment of the application of MDE in each stage is then presented, and we conclude by identifying the main benefits and drawbacks of using MDE in data reengineering.     

Requirements engineering: the state of the practice

Little contemporary data exists for document actual practices of software professionals for software requirements elicitation, requirements specification, document development, and specification validation. This exploratory survey and its quantitative results offer opportunities for further interpretation and comparison.     

An empirical investigation of student acceptance of course websites

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the future in teaching and learning. This paper uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) constructs of usefulness and ease of use to assess university students’ acceptance of course websites as an effective learning tool. A survey instrument was distributed to 450 undergraduate students and a total of 403 usable responses were obtained. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were implemented using structural equation modeling techniques through LISREL version 8.52. A structural equation model was used to fit and validate the Course Website Acceptance Model (CWAM) and the results indicated good fit to the data. Course website usefulness and ease of use proved to be key determinants of the acceptance and usage of course website as an effective and efficient learning technology. The causal relationships between the constructs considered by the CWAM were well supported, accounting for 83% of the total variance in the course website acceptance and usage.     

Rigorous identification and encoding of trace-links in model-driven engineering

Model-driven engineering (MDE) involves the construction and manipulation of many models of different kinds in an engineering process. In principle, models can be used in the product engineering lifecycle in an end-to-end manner for representing requirements, designs and implementations, and assisting in deployment and maintenance. The manipulations applied to models may be manual, but they can also be automated??for example, using model transformations, code generation, and validation. To enhance automated analysis, consistency and coherence of models used in an MDE process, it is useful to identify, establish and maintain trace-links between models. However, the breadth and scope of trace-links that can be used in MDE is substantial, and managing trace-link information can be very complex. In this paper, we contribute to managing the complexity of traceability information in MDE in two ways: firstly, we demonstrate how to identify the different kinds of trace-links that may appear in an end-to-end MDE process; secondly, we describe a rigorous approach to defining semantically rich trace-links between models, where the models themselves may be constructed using diverse modelling languages. The definition of rich trace-links allows us to use tools to maintain and analyse traceability relationships.     

Product line engineering, the state of the practice

Software product lines can be very powerful for ensuring quality, economic efficiency, and manageability of software system families. SPLs are relevant to large industrial enterprises that want to better manage their software-intensive systems' development. They can also provide small start-ups with unique and striking business models. However, SPL technology can be difficult to implement and maintain. A work group comprising five organizations has investigated and compared SPL practices. The results detail the state of SPL practice.