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I am a PhD candidate in the Software Engineering and Technology Group (SET) research group of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. I joined the SET group in October 2006.

I am involved in the FALCON project, a multi-discliplinary research project under the supervision of the Embedded Systems Institute (ESI) with as carrying industrial partner VanDerLande Industries.

Research

Model-driven software engineering

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software engineering paradigm that aims at dealing with increasing software complexity and improving productivity and quality. Reuse of models such that they can be applied for different purposes is one of the challenges that should be solved by applying MDE. Therefore, model transformations are typically applied to transform domain-specific models to other (equivalent) models suitable for different purposes.

Since MDE is becoming increasingly important, model transformations are becoming more prominent as well. Model transformations are in many ways similar to traditional software artifacts. To prevent model transformations from becoming the next maintenance nightmare, they need to adhere to similar quality standards as well.

Quality of model transformations

My research is focused on the development of tools and techniques for assessing and improving the quality of model transformations, in particular with respect to development and maintenance. Quality, in general, is a broad and subjective concept. Therefore, we defined quality in the context of model transformations and indicated what quality attributes we consider relevant with respect to their development and maintenance.

Software metrics are widely-applied for assessing the quality of all kinds of software artifacts. We defined metrics sets for measuring model transformations with the model transformation formalisms ASF+SDF, ATL, QVTO, and Xtend. For the metrics sets for ASF+SDF and for ATL, we conducted an empirical study aiming at establishing a relation between the metrics and aforementioned quality attributes. The identified relations can be used as directives for improving the quality of model transformations. Another approach for improving the quality of model transformations is to support their development and maintenance process with visualization techniques. Visualization techniques have proved their use for traditional software artifacts. Therefore, we developed two visualization techniques for model transformations. The development and validation of the metric sets and visualization techniques have led to insights regarding the development of model transformations.

We published a number of articles on this topic in international conferences and workshops. For an overview of these articles, see the publications section.