ChainTracker: Towards a Comprehensive Tool for Building Code-Generation Environments

Code-generation environments have emerged as a new mechanism for building software systems in a systematic manner. At their core, model-driven engineering technologies such as model-to-model and model-to-text transformations are effectively used to build generation engines. However, due to the complexity of model-to-model and model-to-text transformation scripts, which is exacerbated as they are composed in complex transformation chains, developers face technical and cognitive challenges when architecting, implementing, and maintaining code-generation environments. In this paper we present Chain Tracker, a visualization and trace analysis tool for model-to-model and model-to-text transformation compositions. Chain Tracker aims to support developers of code-generation environments by making the usage of model-driven engineering technologies more efficient, less error prone, and less cognitively challenging.