Extensible Validation Framework for DSLs using MontiCore on the Example of Coding Guidelines

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extensible validation framework built with MontiCore that automatically checks coding guidelines across various domain-specific and general-purpose languages, enhancing syntactic quality assurance.

Contribution

It presents a novel, extensible tool for validating coding guidelines using MontiCore, applicable to multiple languages including UML/P and C++, demonstrated in automotive R&D.

Findings

Successfully validated coding guidelines in automotive projects

Applied framework to UML/P sequence charts

Enhanced syntactic quality control across languages

Abstract

Unit test environments are today's state of the art for many programming languages to keep the software's quality above a certain level. However, the software's syntactic quality necessary for the developers themselves is not covered by the aforementioned frameworks. This paper presents a tool realized using the DSL framework MontiCore for automatically validating easily extensible coding guidelines for any domain specific language or even general purpose languages like C++ and its application in an automotive R&D project where a German OEM and several suppliers were involved. Moreover, it was exemplary applied on UML/P-based sequence charts as well.