Empirical Assessment of the Quality of MVC Web Applications Returned by <tt>xGenerator</tt>

Abstract

Many scholars have reported that the adoption of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) in the industry is still marginal. Real-life case studies, completed with convincing empirical data about the quality of the developed source code, is an effective way to persuade the industry that the adoption of MDE brings an actual added value. This paper reports about the assessment of the quality of the code outputted by xGenerator: a Java technology platform for the development of enterprise Web applications, which implements the MDE paradigm. Two recent papers from Aniche and his colleagues were selected to carry out the measurements. The former study is about metrics and thresholds for MVC Web applications, while the latter presents a catalog of six smells tailored to MVC Web applications. A big merit of both of these proposals is that they fix the metric thresholds by taking into account the MVC software architecture. The results of the empirical assessment, carried out on a real-life project, proved that the quality of the code is high.

Keywords

• code metric
• Model Driven Architecture
• Model Driven Engineering
• Model-View-Controller
• smell
• UML