Model Transformation the Heart and Soul of Model-Driven Software Development

The motivation behind model-driven software development is to move the focus of work from programming to solution modeling. The model-driven approach has a potential to increase development productivity and quality by describing important aspects of a solution with more human-friendly abstractions and by generating common application fragments with templates. For this vision to become reality, software development tools need to automate the many tasks of model construction and transformation, including construction and transformation of models that can be round-trip engineered into code. In this article, we briefly examine different approaches to model transformation and offer recommendations on the desirable characteristics of a language for describing model transformations. In doing so, we are hoping to offer a measuring stick for judging the quality of future model transformation technologies.