Using SEQUAL for Identifying Requirements to Ecore Editors
This work addresses the needs of software engineers using Model-Driven Development by incrementally adapting a known framework to specify tool requirements.
The paper applied the SEQUAL model quality framework to identify requirements for Ecore editors in web-based tools, producing an extensive list of functionality to improve quality aspects like syntactic and semantic quality, though implementation and evaluation are left for future work.
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.