Using triple graph grammars to realise incremental round‐trip engineering

Abstract

Model-driven software engineering is supported with the help of model transformations. At present, the technology for defining and executing uni-directional batch transformations seems to be fairly well developed, while bidirectional and incremental transformations are more difficult to handle. In this study, the authors present a bidirectional and incremental transformation tool for round-trip engineering between class diagrams and Java source code. Unlike other approaches, the tool may work with arbitrary Java code rather than only with source code following specific coding conventions. For its realisation, they selected triple graph grammars (TGGs) because they allow to generate bidirectional incremental transformations from a single set of undirected rules. When applying TGGs, they observed several strengths and weaknesses which are also discussed in this study.