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Query-driven soft traceability links for models

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Abstract

Model repositories play a central role in the model driven development of complex software-intensive systems by offering means to persist and manipulate models obtained from heterogeneous languages and tools. Complex models can be assembled by interconnecting model fragments by hard links, i.e., regular references, where the target end points to external resources using storage-specific identifiers. This approach, in certain application scenarios, may prove to be a too rigid and error prone way of interlinking models. As a flexible alternative, we propose to combine derived features with advanced incremental model queries as means for soft interlinking of model elements residing in different model resources. These soft links can be calculated on-demand with graceful handling for temporarily unresolved references. In the background, the links are maintained efficiently and flexibly by using incremental model query evaluation. The approach is applicable to modeling environments or even property graphs for representing query results as first-class relations, which also allows the chaining of soft links that is useful for modular applications. The approach is evaluated using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and EMF-IncQuery in two complex industrial case studies. The first case study is motivated by a knowledge management project from the financial domain, involving a complex interlinked structure of concept and business process models. The second case study is set in the avionics domain with strict traceability requirements enforced by certification standards (DO-178b). It consists of multiple domain models describing the allocation scenario of software functions to hardware components.

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Notes

  1. Fully implemented and documented at http://incquery.net/incquery/new/examples/query-driven-soft-links.

  2. The authors affiliated with Budapest University of Technology and Economics are also committers of the project.

  3. For comparison of the query language with other formalisms, see [6, 8].

  4. For detailed performance evaluation of EMF-IncQuery as a query evaluation framework see [65].

  5. All measurements were carried out on a PC with Intel Core i5-2410M 2.3 GHz processor, Windows 8, Java 1.6 64 bit with 512 MB heap space (DDR3 memory), wall-time measurement with nanotime precision. The measurements are taken after a warm-up phase in order to eliminate other factors such as class loading, JIT compiler, disk access. The final values are taken as the average of at least 10 measurements.

  6. The numerical results of the measurements are included in Fig. 18 in the Appendix.

  7. Details on integration with existing EMF-based technologies are discussed in Sect. 9.

  8. For usage details , see http://incquery.net/incquery/new/examples/derivedfeatures.

  9. http://wiki.eclipse.org/EMF/Recipes#Recipe:_Derived_Attribute_Notifier.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2., Budapest, 1117, Hungary

    Ábel Hegedüs, Ákos Horváth, István Ráth & Dániel Varró

  2. Embraer S.A. Av Brigadeiro Faria Lima, São José dos Campos, 2170, Brazil

    Rodrigo Rizzi Starr

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  1. Ábel Hegedüs
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  2. Ákos Horváth
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Correspondence to Ábel Hegedüs.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Perdita Stevens.

This work was partially supported by the CERTIMOT (ERC_HU-09-01-2010-0003) and the Trans-IMA (industrial) projects, the TÁMOP (4.2.2.B-10/1-2010-0009) Grant and the János Bolyai Scholarship.

Appendix 1: Integration of soft links with EMF-based tools

Appendix 1: Integration of soft links with EMF-based tools

1.1 Integration with Ecore

In the prototype implementation of our proposal, we integrated our approach to the EMF tooling by a code generator that supports the automatic derivation of integration code for our components ( EMF-IncQuery soft link feature handlers). The input of code generation is a generator model (referencing the EMF genmodel for the domain) that crosslinks derived features with EMF-IncQuery query specifications (stored as EMF models thanks to the Xtext-based tooling [59]).

Fig. 18
figure 18

Performance measurement results

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figure o

The generated integration code (Listing 7) consists of (a) the instantiation of derived feature handlers (in the constructor of EObjects), which ensures that their lifecycle is tied to the hosts, to enable their garbage collection together with the instance model itself; (b) getter implementations that delegate calls to the appropriate function of the feature handler object, and wrap the result in unmodifiable ELists to ensure that any attempt to write to derived features will result in a runtime exception.

1.2 Integration with legacy derived features

In practice, a complete refactoring of an EMF-based tool to exclusively use EMF-IncQuery-based derived features might not be realistic, as derived features have been extensively implemented using Java code or OCL-based approaches such as OCLinEcore [21] supported by Eclipse OCL [20]. As these implementations provide only getter functionality and do not provide change notifications, we implemented an additional derived feature adapter [43] as a lightweight add-on component for EMF model plugins,Footnote 8 which can be used to augment existing derived feature implementations (regardless of whether Java or OCL is used).

The basic concept motivated by a suggestion in the Eclipse FAQFootnote 9 is analogous to the previous discussion. The language engineer can add a few lines of Java code to the generated EMF model plugin: these derived feature adapters attach listeners (through the EMF Notification API) to the (explicitly specified) features a derived feature depends on, and receive notifications when model changes are registered. These notification objects are then processed and converted into new notification objects for the derived feature, propagating through the manager to application code.

This approach has additional key advantages: (1) notification support can be added – with a small implementation effort – to “legacy” derived features, without having to re-write them in EMF-IncQuery; (2) queries specified in EMF-IncQuery (whether for derived features, or on-the-fly validation purposes, or within model transformations) can reference derived features seamlessly. However, performance implications need to be taken into consideration if the original getter (Java code or OCL expression) involves complex logic, or if the derived feature computation has many dependencies but they change only rarely – in those cases, rewriting the Java code or OCL expression into EMF-IncQuery may be a better option.

1.3 Integration with Xcore

Xcore [39] is a textual syntax extension to Ecore, based on Eclipse Xtext. Xcore provides textual constructs for all (static) Ecore concepts such as EClasses, EAttributes and EReferences, and it also can be used to define the dynamic aspects of the modeling language using EOperations and derived features that contain imperative code segments written in Xbase expression language.

As both the pattern specification language of EMF-IncQuery and Xcore are based on Xtext, they can be integrated in a straightforward way. Listing 8 illustrates an extended Xcore syntax that includes some new language elements so that query-based soft links can be seamlessly integrated into the language definition.

figure p

In this case, the definition of the EClass Block imports the query definitions of Listing 4, which is indicated by the import-incqueries keyword, and a new query-based soft link sourceBlock is defined using the incquery- derived keyword, by specifying a reference to the simulink.sourceBlock pattern definition of Listing 4. These concepts can be applied to derived scalar attributes (conforming to EDatatypes) in a straightforward way.

1.4 Processing n-ary traceability queries

In Sect. 5.2, we introduced the query Ternary that represents a traceability hyper-edge between data elements that are read by the task of a given check list element (see Listing 6). Such a query can be used in an application for processing such hyper-edges. This approach shares the functional benefits of soft links, with the one exception that it is not integrated into the EMF model layer and as such, it is not API-transparent to EMF-based tools. Instead, the query results can be accessed through an additional API provided by EMF-IncQuery (illustrated in Listing 9 using Xtend [58]).

figure q

Here, the results of the Ternary pattern are processed using a generated TernaryMatch data transfer class (which is the class of match) and the MatchProcessor visitor interface (that has a single process method inlined in the forEachMatch method). The EMF-IncQuery API also exposes match update facility (Sect. 6.1) that allows to track the changes in the result of such a query. The second part of Listing 9 shows that a change listener is registered and added (or removed) matches can be handled.

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Hegedüs, Á., Horváth, Á., Ráth, I. et al. Query-driven soft traceability links for models. Softw Syst Model 15, 733–756 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0436-y

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