Templatized Model Transformations: Enabling Reuse in Model Transformations

Model transformations are a key element of model-based software development processes. Despite their importance, existing model transformation tools and processes have limited support for reuse, particularly, in the context of product line development that must handle variability among product variants. This forces developers to reinvent the transformation rules thereby adversely impacting their productivity and increasing maintenance costs. This paper presents MTS (Model-transformation Templatization and Specialization), which overcomes these limitations by enabling developers to write reusable, templatized model transformations. MTS defines two higher order transformations to capture the variability and to specialize the transformations across variants of an application family. MTS can be realized within existing model transformation tools with minimal modifications. A qualitative evaluation of MTS is presented describing the reduction in efforts to define model transformation rules as new variants are added to the product line.