A customizable approach for the automated quality assessment of modelling artifacts

In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) giving a precise definition of quality models, identifying which quality attributes are of interest for specific stakeholders, and how relating and aggregating together quality attributes are still open issues. The main limitations of currently available quality approaches are limited extensibility, artifact specificity, and manual assessment. This paper proposes an approach supporting the definition of custom quality models consisting of hierarchically organized quality attributes whose evaluation depends on metrics specifically conceived and applied on the modeling artifacts to be analysed. A domain specific language is proposed to specify how quality attributes and metrics have to be aggregated. An execution environment is also provided to apply the defined quality models on actual modeling artifacts so to enable their automated quality assessment. Real applications of the approach are presented by defining and applying explanatory quality models suitably conceived to assess the quality of metamodels and transformations retrieved from public repositories.