A modeling assistant to manage technical debt in coupled evolution

Context: Model-Driven Engineering helps formalize problem domains by using metamodels. Modeling ecosys-tems consisting of purposely designed editors, transformations, and code generators are defined on top of the metamodels. Similar to other software artifacts, metamodels can evolve by possibly compromising the validity of existing artifacts. Coupled evolution provides techniques for restoring artifacts' validity in response to metamodel evolution. Objective: In this paper, we propose the adoption of deprecation in metamodeling to mitigate the difficulties in performing manual model adaptations in response to metamodel evolutions. Moreover, we aim to measure and resolve the technical debt during the co-evolution, which can be seen as the outcome of procrastinating artifact migrations.Methods: We propose a novel approach and supporting tool to manage the concepts of deprecation and technical debt in metamodeling.Results: We conducted a judgment study using the focus group methodology to assess the proposed approach's usefulness in migrating models affected by breaking non-resolvable changes completely.Conclusions: The proposed approach can identify the technical debt in metamodel evolution. Furthermore, it deals with the coupled evolution problem by assisting the modeler through interactive visualization tools, which highlight and quantify the technical dept of the artifacts under analysis that need to be evolved.