An Overview of Quality Frameworks in Model-Driven Engineering and Observations on Transformation Quality

Quality is often defined as fitness for purpose which is the key property to determine when evaluating quality. This paper presents some general requirements for evaluating quality frameworks. It also discusses characteristics of MDE that are important when building a quality framework, such as its use of models in several stages of development and maintenance, and its multi-abstraction level approach that requires consistency and traceability. MDE should strive for engineering of quality into software. As a step in extending quality frameworks for this purpose, we discuss integrating quality evaluation with quality engineering using MDE approaches. Applying it on transformations, we discuss both the transformability of models and the quality of transformations themselves. While completeness and precision of models are quality criteria for transformability of them, transformations should monitor and preserve model quality, be reusable, simple and efficient. We further discuss quality means and evaluation methods and propose future work.