Preserving and Synchronising Hand-Written Text in Model-to-Text Transformation

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to software development that has been suggested as a possible alternative to more traditional programming-based approaches to the problem of developing software that can effectively cope with the complexity of modern systems. MDE encourages the use of modeling languages as a means of providing an abstract description of systems and offers methods for automatically generating a variety of development artifacts, such as documentation and code, from the source models. In the process of developing a complex system, several stakeholders are often involved. These stakeholders make use of a variety of tools in order to alter the development artifacts, source models and generated code. Model-to-Text transformations (M2T) are used for the generation from models of any kind of textual artefact, such as documentation, source code, requirements specifications, and manuals. The focus of this thesis is on combining text generated with such M2T transformations and hand-written text. In particular, the thesis proposed an approach for automatically synchronising changes made to embedded code fragments at the generated code level, with the models from which these fragments originate. The proposed approach has been implemented on top of an existing model-to-text transformation language (the Epsilon Generation Languages) to evaluate their completeness, applicability, and performance.