Technical debt in MDE: a case study on GMF/EMF based projects
Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor referring to immature software artifacts that can hurt the long term maintenance of a system. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is a model centric software development approach, which promises better maintainability. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the existence and influence of TD in the context of MDE. This paper investigates the code level TD in MDE projects, which is incurred during code generation. We evaluated 16 open source and non trivial GMF/EMF based MDE projects using bad smells, which are widely accepted TD indicators. The results demonstrate that MDE is not TD free, and code generators also incur TD, similarly to developers. In fact, the generated code usually contains more TD than handwritten code, which influences significantly the maintenance of MDE projects.
MoDELS