An Architecture-Driven Modernization Tool for Calculating Metrics

Model-driven software development (MDD) is gaining increasing acceptance, mainly because it can raise the level of abstraction and automation in software construction. MDD techniques (see the sidebar "MDD Basic Concepts"), such as metamodeling and model transformation, not only apply to the creation of new software systems but also can be used to evolve existing systems. These techniques can help reduce software evolution costs by automating many basic activities in software change processes, such as representing source code at a higher level of abstraction, providing information to analyze the impact of the changes, or automatically generating software artifacts of the evolved system. Several experiences of applying MDD in platform migration scenarios have recently been published,1´2 but they define ad hoc metamodels that hinder interoperability.