A Tooling Environment for Quality-Driven Domain-Specific Modelling

There is an increasing need for reducing costs and improving quality in software development. One of the means to reduce costs is to increase productivity by utilizing Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM). Industry cases consistently show a 5-10 fold increase in productivity when DSM is applied, in addition to a decrease of errors in generated code. In order to improve quality and especially desired quality attributes, e.g., performance and reliability, quality requirements must be considered in every development phase. Also a trace link from quality requirements definitions to implementation and tests has to be maintained to assure that the resulting application truly satisfies the requirements. As Model-Driven Development is heavily dependent on provided tool support, a tooling environment that enables quality-driven DSM would be useful. Thus in this paper, we study if MetaCase MetaEdit+ language workbench can be utilized as such by developing a code generator and a domainspecific modelling language for a laboratory case of streamoriented computing systems. We found that the chosen environment is appropriate for an industrial application of qualitydriven DSM.