The goal of this work is to facilitate the task of integrating measurement and redesign tools in modelling environments for Domain Specific Visual Languages (DSVLs), reducing or eliminating the necessity of coding. With this purpose, we have created a DSVL called SLAMMER that includes generalizations of some of the more used types of product metrics and frequent model manipulations, which can be easily customised for any other DSVL in a graphical way. The metric customisation process relies on visual patterns for the specification of the elements that should be measured in each metric type, while redesigns (as well as other actions) can be specified either personalizing generic templates or by means of graph transformation systems. The provided DSVL also allows creating new metrics, composing metrics, and executing actions guided by measurement values. The approach has been empirically validated by its implementation in a meta-modelling tool, which has been used for several DSVLs. In this way, together with the DSVL specification, a SLAMMER model can be provided containing a suite of metrics and actions that will become available in the final modelling environment. In this chapter we show a case study for a notation in the web engineering domain. As ensuring model quality is a key success factor in many computer science areas, even crucial in model-driven development, we believe that the results of this work benefit all of them by providing automatic support for the specification, generation and integration of measurement and redesign tools with modelling environments.
Visual Specification of Metrics for Domain Specific Visual Languages
