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Using DevOps toolchains in Agile model-driven engineering

Software and Systems Modeling volume 21, pages 1495–1510 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

For model-driven engineering (MDE) to become more Agile, the community needs to embrace development and operations (DevOps) practices. One of the core practices of DevOps is the use of pipelines to enable CI/CD to make teams more Agile and break down the barriers between development and operations with faster deployments. Current MDE tooling is not designed at its core to participate in DevOps pipelines. Consequently this makes the adoption of MDE in industry more difficult. In this article, we cover an industrial experience report describing how we enabled our pipelines using DevOps and MDE.

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Notes

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  14. https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/parallel.html.

  15. https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/typedef.html.

  16. Since our company is based on making coding support systems known as Bots available to the public, and we need to build these internally, we dubbed the system architecture BotBuilder. As it offers twice the variability, speed, and access to tools as compared to its predecessors, its version number is \(2^3=8\). And we admit a slight nod to Star Wars as well.

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  18. https://help.eclipse.org/latest/nav/4_2_0.

  19. https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.tycho.

  20. https://bnd.bndtools.org.

  21. https://JUnit.org/JUnit5/docs/current/user-guide/#extensions.

  22. https://help.eclipse.org/latest/topic/org.eclipse.pde.doc.user/guide/tools/launchers/JUnit_launcher.htm.

  23. https://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Progress-Monitors/article.html.

  24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUnit.

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  26. https://ant.apache.org/antlibs/antunit/.

  27. https://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/eunit/.

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  32. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/.

  33. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/pull/.

  34. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/.

  35. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/commit/.

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  37. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/.

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  41. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/.

  42. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/multi_project_pipelines.html#multi-project-pipeline-visualization.

  43. https://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/eol#context-independent-user-input.

  44. https://ant.apache.org/manual/inputhandler.html.

  45. https://www.antlr.org.

  46. https://aml-org.github.io/aml-spec/vocabularies/.

  47. https://github.com/eclipse/agileuml.

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  49. https://www.eclipse.org/emfcloud/.

  50. https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/ant.html.

  51. https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/subant.html.

  52. https://github.com/kubernetes-client/java/.

  53. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/job/.

  54. https://help.eclipse.org/latest/topic/org.eclipse.emf.cdo.doc/html/Overview.html.

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  58. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/.

  59. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/interactive_web_terminal/.

Abbreviations

MDE:

Model-driven engineering

DevOps:

Development and operations

CI:

Continuous integration

CD:

Continuous deployment

EMF:

Eclipse Modelling Framework

MOF:

Meta-object facility

CORBA:

Common object request broker architecture

RCP:

Rich content platform

UI:

User interface

PDE:

Plugin development environment

P2:

Provisioning system 2

JMI:

Java metadata interface (JSR40)

MOF:

Meta-object facility

EOL:

Epsilon object language

DSL:

Domain-specific language

MWE2:

Modelling Workflow Engine 2

UML:

Unified modelling language

EMC:

Epsilon model connectivity

RDF:

Resource description framework

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Research and Development, Codebots Pty. Ltd, 55 Railway Terrace, Milton, QLD, 4064, Australia

      Jörn Guy Süß, Samantha Swift & Eban Escott

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    1. Jörn Guy Süß
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    2. Samantha Swift
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    Correspondence to Jörn Guy Süß.

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    Communicated by K. Lano, S. Kolahdouz-Rahimi, J. Troya, and H. Alfraihi.

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    Samantha Swift and Eban Escott contributed equally to this work.

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    Cite this article

    Süß, J.G., Swift, S. & Escott, E. Using DevOps toolchains in Agile model-driven engineering. Softw Syst Model 21, 1495–1510 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-022-01003-2

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    Keywords

    • DevOps
    • CI/CD
    • Ant
    • EMF
    • Eclipse
    • Agile
    • Model-driven engineering
    • MDE