🤖 AI Summary
Empirical evidence on the impact of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) on software quality is fragmented and lacks systematic integration. Method: This paper conducts the first tertiary study dedicated to MDE quality research, systematically analyzing 22 published systematic literature reviews and mapping studies. It establishes a three-tier analytical framework to characterize research distribution, evidential strength, and methodological maturity in the MDE–quality domain. Results: Maintainability is the most studied quality attribute; however, among 83 identified research questions, 80 focus solely on conceptual or syntactic model-to-code mappings, with few conducting empirical comparisons. Crucially, MDE’s actual impact on quality in industrial development contexts remains markedly under-investigated. The study exposes a structural bias toward “re-modeling over validation” in current research and identifies critical gaps requiring urgent attention: rigorous experimental design, industry-based empirical validation, and multi-attribute quality assessment frameworks.
📝 Abstract
Model-driven engineering (MDE) is believed to have a significant impact in software quality. However, researchers and practitioners may have a hard time locating consolidated evidence on this impact, as the available information is scattered in several different publications. Our goal is to aggregate consolidated findings on quality in MDE, facilitating the work of researchers and practitioners in learning about the coverage and main findings of existing work as well as identifying relatively unexplored niches of research that need further attention. We performed a tertiary study on quality in MDE, in order to gain a better understanding of its most prominent findings and existing challenges, as reported in the literature. We identified 22 systematic literature reviews and mapping studies and the most relevant quality attributes addressed by each of those studies, in the context of MDE. Maintainability is clearly the most often studied and reported quality attribute impacted by MDE. Eighty out of 83 research questions in the selected secondary studies have a structure that is more often associated with mapping existing research than with answering more concrete research questions (e.g., comparing two alternative MDE approaches with respect to their impact on a specific quality attribute). We briefly outline the main contributions of each of the selected literature reviews. In the collected studies, we observed a broad coverage of software product quality, although frequently accompanied by notes on how much more empirical research is needed to further validate existing claims. Relatively, little attention seems to be devoted to the impact of MDE on the quality in use of products developed using MDE.