Reporting on a Survey on Approaches to Co-Evolution of Metamodels and Models

Abstract

The paper was published in 2016 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2016.2610424). Modeling languages, just as all software artifacts, evolve. This poses the risk that legacy models of a company get lost, when they become incompatible with the new language version. To address this risk, a multitude of approaches for metamodel-model co-evolution were proposed in the last 10 years. However, the high number of solutions makes it difficult for practitioners to choose an appropriate approach. In this paper, we present a survey on 31 approaches to support metamodel-model co-evolution. We introduce a taxonomy of solution techniques and classify the existing approaches. To support researchers, we discuss the state of the art, in order to better identify open issues. Furthermore, we use the results to provide a decision support for practitioners, who aim to adopt solutions from research.