A. Bergmayr, M. Wimmer, W. Retschitzegger, U. Zdun: Taking the Pick out of the Bunch - Type-Safe Shrinking of Metamodels, Multikonferenz Software Engineering 2013 - Aachen, February 26-March 1st, 2013, in Software Engineering 2013, Fachtagung des GI-Fachbereichs Softwaretechnik, February 26-March 1st, 2013, S. Kowalewski, B. Rumpe (Hrg.); Bonn (2013), ISBN: 978-3-88579-607-7, pages 85-98. pdf
To focus only on those parts of a metamodel that are of interest for a specifictask requires techniques to generate metamodel snippets. Current techniques generatestrictly structure-preserving snippets, only, although restructuring would facilitateto generate less complex snippets. Therefore, we propose metamodel shrinking toenable type-safe restructuring of snippets that are generated from base metamodels.Our approach allows to shrink a selected set of metamodel elements by automaticreductions that guarantee type-safe results by design. Based on experiments with12different metamodels from various application domains, we demonstrate the benefits ofmetamodel shrinking supported by our prototypical implementation build on top of theEclipse Modeling Framework (EMF).