Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software engineering paradigm based on the systematic use of models. Over the past few years, engineers have significantly increased the use of MDE, which has been reported as a successful paradigm for developing industrial software. Recently, there have also been remarkable advancements in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain, with a significant increase in advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The advances in both fields have led to a surge in works that dwell within the intersection of ML and MDE. This work places the focus on systematically reviewing works that leverage ML to solve MDE problems. We have reviewed a total of 9,194 papers, selecting 98 studies for further analysis. The results of our Systematic Literature Review (SLR) bring light to the current state of the art and trends in the field, discussing the drift in the usage of the different available ML techniques along with the remaining research gaps and open challenges. Our SLR has the potential to produce a positive impact in the research community by steering it towards ML techniques that have been successfully applied to solve MDE challenges.

In industry, software projects might span over decades, with many engineers joining or leaving the company over time. In these circumstances, no single engineer has all of the knowledge when maintenance tasks such as Traceability Link Recovery (TLR), Bug Localization (BL), and Feature Location (FL) are performed. Thus, collaboration has the potential to boost the quality of maintenance tasks since the solution advanced by one engineer might be enhanced with contributions from other engineers. However, assembling a team of software engineers to collaborate may not be as intuitive as we might think. In the context of a worldwide industrial supplier of railway solutions, this work evaluates how the quality of TLR, BL, and FL is affected by the criteria for selecting engineers for collaboration. The criteria for collaboration are based on engineers’ profile information to select the set of search queries that are involved in the maintenance task. Collaboration is achieved by applying automatic query reformulation, and the location relies on an evolutionary algorithm. Our work uncovers how software engineers who might be seen as not being relevant in the collaboration can lead to significantly better results. A focus group confirmed the relevance of the findings.

Abstract Increasingly, the model driven engineering (MDE) community is paying more attention to the techniques offered by the machine learning (ML) community. This has led to the application of ML techniques to MDE related tasks in hope of increasing the current benefits of MDE. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical experiments that evaluate the benefits that ML brings to MDE. In this work, we evaluate the benefits of empowering model engineers of model‐driven development (MDD) with an ML classifier. To do this, we tackled how to embed the ML classifier as part of the MDD. Then, this was evaluated using two different real industrial cases. Our results show that despite the ML part takes an extra effort, the use of the ML classifier pays off in terms of the quality results, the perceived usefulness, and intention to use.

Model Fragment Location (MFL) aims at identifying model elements that are relevant to a requirement, feature, or bug. Many MFL approaches have been introduced in the last few years to address the identification of the model elements that correspond to a specific functionality. However, there is a lack of detail when the measurements about the search space (models) and the measurements about the solution to be found (model fragment) are reported. Generally, the only reported measure is the model size. In this paper, we propose using five measurements (size, volume, density, multiplicity, and dispersion) to report the location problems. These measurements are the result of analyzing 1,308 MFLs in a family of industrial models over the last four years. Using two MFL approaches, we emphasize the importance of these measurements in order to compare results. Our work not only proposes improving the reporting of the location problem, but it also provides real measurements of location problems that are useful to other researchers in the design of synthetic location problems.