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MDE in the Wild: An Exploratory Analysis on What Developers are Discussing from Q&A Platforms

Published: 21 December 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach that considers models as first-class entities used in the software analysis, design and implementation. Although MDE has become popular in both academia and industry as an alternative for tackling the growing complexity of modern software, MDE has not been largely adopted in the software development process. A possible way to mitigate those problems consists of understanding how MDE has been applied in practice and what are the main barriers found by developers. Hence, this paper presents an exploratory study to analyse the discussions about MDE from two Q&A platforms: Stack Overflow and Software Engineering Stack Exchange. One hundred fourteen discussions have been analysed under four perspectives: discussion type, application domain, tools, and developer interest. As a result, we identified that 69, 30% of the discussions regard technical aspects, from which metamodelling is the most discussed topic, and Xtext is the most discussed tool. In addition, we observed that discussions in which developers suggest MDE-related tools tend to attract more views and answers.

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  • (2024)Model‐driven engineering for simulation models interoperability: A case study in space industrySoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.330954:6(1010-1033)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
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  • (2021)On the relation between technical debt indicators and quality criteria in Stack Overflow discussionsProceedings of the XXXV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3474624.3474648(432-441)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    SBES '20: Proceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
    October 2020
    901 pages
    ISBN:9781450387538
    DOI:10.1145/3422392
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 21 December 2020

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    1. Mining Software Repositories
    2. Model-Driven Engineering

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    View all
    • (2024)Model‐driven engineering for simulation models interoperability: A case study in space industrySoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.330954:6(1010-1033)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
    • (2022)eGEN: an energy-saving modeling language and code generator for location-sensing of mobile appsProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3558914(1697-1700)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
    • (2021)On the relation between technical debt indicators and quality criteria in Stack Overflow discussionsProceedings of the XXXV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3474624.3474648(432-441)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021

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