Using SEQUAL for Identifying Requirements to Ecore Editors

TL;DR

This paper applies the SEQUAL framework to identify essential requirements for Ecore modeling tools, especially in web environments, aiming to enhance model quality across multiple aspects.

Contribution

It extends the SEQUAL framework to specify requirements for Ecore editors, providing a comprehensive list to guide tool development and quality improvement.

Findings

Generated extensive list of Ecore editor requirements

Identified trade-offs for implementing quality aspects

Contributed to improving the SEQUAL framework

Abstract

Software engineers who use Model-Driven Development may be using Ecore for their work. Ecore is traditionally edited in Eclipse IDE, but a recent transition to Web tools allows for development of new Ecore editors. To investigate the needed functionality of such modeling tools, the model quality framework SEQUAL has been applied. The paper presents the current results of this task, producing requirements for tool functionality as quality improving means for the following quality aspects: physical, empirical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, social and deontic. The result is an extensive list of tool functionality that could be implemented by the Ecore editor developers. Although many requirements are identified, the framework should also help in making trade-offs in case not all requirements can be implemented. In this way the paper both contribute to identifying modeling tool functionality, and to have input to improve SEQUAL as a general model quality framework. Further work will need to be done on the implementation of the tools for properly evaluating this work.