A Systematic Taxonomy of Metamodel Evolution Impacts on OCL Expressions

Metamodel evolution is prevalent in Model-Driven Engineering, necessitating the co-evolution of dependent artifacts like models and transformations. Whereas model co-evolution has been extensively studied, the co-evolution of transformations and especially its substantial ingredient in terms of OCL expressions has received little attention up to now. Thus, the goal of this paper is a systematic analysis of potential impacts of metamodel evolution on OCL expressions in model transformations. For this, a complete and minimal set of atomic metamodel changes has been derived from Ecore, which is analyzed with respect to its effects on structural complexity and information capacity. This analysis builds the basis for investigating the impacts concerning syntactical conformance and scope of affected OCL expressions. Finally, we report on lessons learned gained from establishing the set of changes and examining the impacts thereof.