Taming Model Round-Trip Engineering

Abstract

Abstract: Round-trip engineering is a challenging task that will become an important enabler for many Model-Driven Software Development approaches. Model round-trip engineering involves synchronizing models and keeping them consistent, thus enabling the software engineer to freely move between different representations. This vision of complete round-trip engineering is only realized to a limited degree in tools nowadays, and it proves to be a very difficult problem to solve in general. In this paper, our goal is to clarify some of the issues in automating round-trip engineering and point out some of the highlevel qualities that are desirable for round-trip engineering approaches to possess. Clarifying this domain is an important first step towards being able to systematically automate round-trip engineering of models. 1