A Survey on the Relevance of the Performance of Model Transformations

Abstract

When we are confronted with performance issues in a general-purpose language, like Java, it is a given to us that we have various tools and techniques at our disposal to help us. But is such support also needed when using model transformation languages? To address this question, we conducted a quantitative online survey as part of a mixed methods study with 84 respondents to our questionnaire. Our results show that a certain performance is desired but not always achieved. The developers would like to improve the performance, but they lack insights on how a transformation is performed. As a first step to mitigate this issue, we compiled a list of information regarding the models used, the transformations applied and their execution deemed to be helpful by the participants. Additionally, we used hypotheses tests to investigate possible influencing factors that cause participants to try to improve the performance of transformations. The main relevant factors found in our study are the satisfaction with the execution time, the size of the models used, the relevance of whether a certain execution time is not exceeded in the average case, and the knowledge of how a transformation engine executes a transformation.