This JOT special section contains three extended and peer reviewed papers from the first and second editions of the International Workshop on Verification Of modeL Transformation (VOLT). The first edition of VOLT was held on April 21st, 2012 in Montreal, Canada as satellite event of the 5th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2012). The second edition was held on June 17th, 2013 in Budapest, Hungary as a satellite event of Federated Conferences on Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF 2013).
Model transformations are everywhere in software development, implicitly or explicitly. They became first-class citizens with the advent of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Despite some recent activity in the field, the work on the verification of model transformations remains scattered and a clear perspective on the subject is still not in sight. Moreover, current model transformation tools often lack verification techniques to support such activities. The goal of VOLT is to offer researchers a dedicated forum to classify, discuss, propose, and advance verification techniques dedicated to model transformations. VOLT promotes discussions between theoreticians and practitioners from academy and industry. A significant part of the workshop editions includes a forum for discussing practical applications of model transformations and their verification, including interesting properties to verify and efficient techniques to actually compute those properties.
For this special section, we selected three papers by means of at least two rounds of reviews. All papers were refereed by four well-known experts in the field. The selected papers are the following:
- Moussa Amrani, Benoit Combemale, Levi Lucio, Gehan Selim, Juergen Dingel, Yves Le Traon, Hans Vangheluwe and James Cordy in their paper entitled “Formal Verification Techniques for Model Transformations: A Tridimensional Classification” discuss the evolution, trends, and current practices in model transformation verification found in the literature from three viewpoints: the transformations, their properties, and the verification techniques.
- David Lindecker, Gabor Simko, Tihamer Levendovszky, István Madari and Janos Sztipanovits in their paper entitled “Validating Transformations for Semantic Anchoring” present a technique to validate that a domain-specific language satisfies the intentions that the designer had in mind when engineering the language. The approach consists of validating the consistency between a formalization of intention of a language designer and the semantic mapping of the language, the latter being expressed as a formal model transformation.
- Rick Salay, Marsha Chechik, Michalis Famelis and Jan Gorzny in their paper entitled “A Methodology for Verifying Refinements of Partial Models” present a technique to verify how uncertainty present in models and transformations is reduced after refining models and model transformations.
We would like to thank everyone who has made this special section possible. In particular, we are obliged to all past VOLT organizers, to the reviewers for giving off their time to thoroughly and thoughtfully review papers multiple times, to the authors for contributing to VOLT and JOT with high quality papers, and to the JOT editorial board for making this special issue possible.
Eugene Syriani, University of Montreal (Canada)
Manuel Wimmer, Vienna University of Technology (Austria)