Metamodel Quality Requirements and Evaluation (MQuaRE)

TL;DR

This paper introduces MQuaRE, an integrated framework for evaluating the quality of software metamodels, addressing a gap in comprehensive assessment methods within model-driven software engineering.

Contribution

The paper presents MQuaRE, a novel, comprehensive framework combining quality requirements, models, measures, and evaluation processes for metamodel quality assessment.

Findings

Provides a structured evaluation framework for metamodel quality

Integrates ISO/IEC 25000 standards into metamodel evaluation

Addresses the lack of comprehensive metamodel quality assessment methods

Abstract

Models are the primary artifacts of model-driven software engineering (MDSD) [1], and a terminal model is a representation that conforms to a given software metamodel [2, 3]. As the quality of a software metamodel directly impacts the quality of terminal models, software metamodel quality is an essential aspect of MDSD. However, the literature reports a few proposals for metamodel quality evaluation, but most lack a general solution for the quality issue. Some efforts focus on quality measures [4], a quality evaluation model [5], or a quality evaluation model with structural measures borrowed from OO design [6, 7, 8]. Thus, we support there is a need for a more thorough solution for metamodel quality evaluation, with potential benefits to MDSD in general. This document describes a metamodel quality evaluation framework called MQuaRE (Metamodel Quality Requirements and Evaluation). MQuaRE is an integrated framework composed of metamodel quality requirements, a metamodel quality model, metamodel quality measures, and an evaluation process, with a great contribution of the ISO/IEC 25000 series [9] for software product quality evaluation.