Understanding MDE projects: megamodels to the rescue for architecture recovery

Conventional wisdom on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) suggests that this software discipline is the key to achieve superior automation, whether it be refactoring, simulation, or code generation. However, the diversity of employed languages and technologies blurs the picture making it difficult to analyze existing MDE-based projects in order to retrieve architectural information to foster a better understanding about the rationale behind them. Thus, the ability of carefully analyzing projects to identify their components and their interrelationships is key to obtain representations at a higher level of abstraction that can support reuse processes. In this paper, a megamodel-based approach to the reverse engineering of model-driven projects is proposed in order to leverage the representation of the involved technologies and assets. An automated recovery technique implemented by the MDEprofiler infrastructure is presented and illustrated by analyzing community projects in terms of basic MDE artifacts (such as models and metamodels) and the usage of common technologies such as model transformations and code generators.