Resilience in sirius editors: Understanding the impact of meta-model changes

Meta-models are cardinal assets in Model-Driven Engineering because a diversity of artifacts depend on them, including visual editors. Similar to any other software entity, meta-models are expected to evolve during their life-cycle. Consequently, whenever a meta-model changes, any related artifact must be consistently adapted to preserve its well-formedness, consistency, or intrinsic correctness. Sirius-based editors are no exception. In this paper, we present a study that analyzes the impact of meta-model changes over visual editors based on the Sirius framework. Changes are classified according to their adverse effects in order to provide designers with the possibility to perform an early assessment of the effort needed to restore the editor consistency.