Supporting safe metamodel evolution with edelta

Metamodels play a crucial role in any model-based application. They underpin the definition of models and tools, and the development of model management operations, including model transformations and analysis. Like any software artifacts, metamodels are subject to evolution to improve their quality or implement unforeseen requirements. Metamodels can be defined in terms of existing ones to increase the separation of concerns and foster reuse. However, the induced coupling can give additional evolution complexity, and dedicated support is needed to avoid breaking metamodels defined in terms of those being changed. This paper presents a tool-supported approach that can automatically analyze the available metamodels and alert modelers in case of change operations that can give place to invalid situations like dangling references. The approach has been implemented in the Edelta development environment and successfully applied to metamodels retrieved from a publicly available Ecore models dataset.