WELCOME TO MDETools 2018!

Second Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering Tools, 15 October 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark

Motivation

For software engineering research results to impact modern, industrial software development and how it is taught in significant ways, the implementation and encapsulation of the results in sufficiently mature, effective, and usable tools appears to be a necessity. The more effective, usable, and available these tools and their supporting documentation materials are, the easier it is for prospective users to determine the scope, benefits, and limitations of the tools in relevant contexts, thus maximizing the potential for more adoption and impact.

While the implementation and maintenance of such tools is not trivial and typically cannot be accomplished without significant resources, many recent technological advances (e.g., frameworks, libraries, and metatools such as language workbenches), standards, and social developments (e.g., the increasing trend towards open source software and the sharing of expertise via question-and-answer websites such as stackoverflow.com) can provide substantial help. Similarly, the creation of effective supporting documentation is often facilitated through the use of more “modern” formats such as screen casts and video tutorials, which can then easily be dissiminated via services such as YouTube or FaceBook.

Many other communities have recognized the importance of tools and, e.g., created workshops specifically designed to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of tools. Examples include (all held in 2016),

• the Language Workbench Challenge
• the Transformation Tool Contest
• the SAT Competition
• the VerifyThis Verification Competition

While efforts have been made to compare modeling approaches (in, e.g., the Comparing Modeling Approaches Workshop), the modeling research community does not appear to be paying as much attention as some other communities to more effectively leveraging tools for illustrating, evaluating, and dissiminating research results, and for making a convincing case for more wide-spread adoption of modeling and MDE. More specifically,

• there is evidence suggesting that the quality of documentation of many MDE tools is too low,
• there is insufficient support for determining and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of MDE tools, their suitability for specific tasks, and opportunities for interoperation and reuse,
• few repeatable tool evaluations and comparisons exist that use appropriate, publicly accessible use cases and that have been carried out by independent third parties,
• challenges such as usability, interoperability, and integration should receive more attention,
• new and emerging applications and application domains (such as the ‘digital twin’ and ‘digital thread’ concepts), and application domains (such as the systems engineering, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things), as well as recent technological and industrial developments and trends such as open source MDE tooling, Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol (LSP) are largely unstudied.

Objectives

The high-level goal of the workshop is to support the effective development, maintenance, dissimination, and use of highquality MDE tools and supporting documentation material. To this end, the workshop has the following objectives:

1. Facilitate the determination of the state-of-the-art in MDE tools and comparative evaluations of existing tools by identifying comparison criteria, use cases, and evaluation procedures,
2. Discuss strengths, weaknesses of tools, together with opportunities for improvements, reuse, and ‘cross-fertilization’,
3. Identify relevant industrial trends, opportunities and challenges and how they can be leveraged or dealt with,
4. Collect best practices for the development, distribution, and maintenance of MDE tools and any supporting material.

The workshop welcomes regular paper submissions on these topics. But, to facilitate the comparison of tools, it also solicits submissions that demonstrate the use and utility of a specific tool for model-driven software development in the context of a challenge problem. The problem involves a rover navigation task defined through a stand-alone simulation environment that will be made available on the workshop webpage. Moreover, the workshop also features a video tutorials track which challenges the community to create appealing video tutorials that describe the use of a tool for a specific purpose in an informative and accurate, but also effective and attractive way. Links to sample tutorials, tools, and some advice in the form of best practices will be made available on the workshop webpage.