A Metamodel for Specifying Quality Models in Model-Driven Engineering

In the context of model-driven engineering, models act as the primary artifacts and are eventually transformed into other artifacts, such as code and documentation. Consequently, to evaluate and assure the quality of software systems, developers need tools and techniques that allow them to reflect upon the quality of the models themselves. This research paper discusses existing quality models before proposing a metamodel for specifying quality models in the context of model-driven engineering. A tool is being developed in Eclipse based on the proposed metamodel. For each project, developers can use the tool, consisting of predefined concepts relevant to quality, to select quality goals based on the context of their particular project. We will use the quality models to integrate previous work on the quality issues in model-driven engineering by relating the identified quality goals to quality-carrying properties, practices or means to achieve them, metrics for evaluation and collected empirical evidence.