A Generic Approach to Detect Design Patterns in Model Transformations Using a String-Matching Algorithm
This addresses the challenge of software maintenance for developers working with model transformations, though it is incremental as it applies existing string-matching methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining model transformations by proposing a generic technique to automatically detect design patterns and their variations in model transformation implementations, which also identifies degenerate forms to suggest improvements.
Maintaining software artifacts is among the hardest tasks an engineer faces. Like any other piece of code, model transformations developed by engineers are also subject to maintenance. To facilitate the comprehension of programs, software engineers rely on many techniques, such as design pattern detection. Therefore, detecting design patterns in model transformation implementations is of tremendous value for developers. In this paper, we propose a generic technique to detect design patterns and their variations in model transformation implementations automatically. It takes as input a set of model transformation rules and the participants of a model transformation design pattern to find occurrences of the latter in the former. The technique also detects certain kinds of degenerate forms of the pattern, thus indicating potential opportunities to improve the model transformation implementation.