Predicting Incompatibility of Transformations in Model-driven Development

The grand vision of model-driven development and model-driven architecture (MDA) is to generate automatically an implementation from a high-level model of the application. The primary ingredients of model-driven development are a platform-independent model (PIM) of the application and a platform-specific model (PSM) which is derived from the PIM for a given target platform. The transformation from PIM to PSM could be done automatically if necessary mappings are defined. Even if this grand vision were to be realized sometime in the future, the evolution of applications developed in this way still poses interesting challenges. We point out specific problems that arise when evolving an application to support different platforms and different technologies. We then propose a supporting tool called a "portability checker" that can help the application developer in evolving applications developed using MDA.