Quality Attributes for Software Metamodels

As Model-Based Engineering (MBE) starts to be effectively used, some of its constituent disciplines such as Domain Specific Modeling and Metamodeling are becoming quite popular. Metamodels play a cornerstone role in these approaches, not only for defining Domain Specific Languages but also for specifying all kinds of artifacts involved in MBE. However, there is a lack of appropriate quality models that allow an effective assessment of Metamodels. Besides, the international standards that address the software products’ quality issues (in particular, those from ISO and IEEE) have shown to be too general for dealing with the specific characteristics of Metamodels because of their dual nature of being models on the one hand, and representing modeling languages on the other. In this paper we propose a quality model for Metamodels, that defines a set of quality attributes for evaluating Metamodels.