Measuring Models

International audienceModel-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to software development that uses models as primary artifacts, from which code, documentation and tests are derived. One way of assessing quality assurance in a given domain is to define domain metrics. We show that some of these metrics are supported by models. As text documents, models can be considered from a syntactic point of view i.e., thought of as graphs. We can readily apply graph-based metrics to them, such as the number of nodes, the number of edges or the fan-in/fan-out distributions. However, these metrics cannot leverage the semantic structuring enforced by each specific meta-model to give domain specific information. Contrary to graph-based metrics, more specific metrics do exist for given domains (such as LOC for programs), but they lack genericity. Our contribution is to propose one metric , called σ, that is generic over metamodels and allows the easy specification of an open-ended wide range of model metrics