Debugging in Domain-Specific Modelling

An important obstacle to the wide-spread adoption of model-driven development approaches in industry is the lack of proper debugging facilities. Software debugging support is provided by a combination of language and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) features which enable the monitoring and altering of a running program's state. In Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM), debugging activities have a wider scope: designers debug model transformations (MTs) and synthesized artifacts, while domain-specific modellers debug their models, unaware of generated artifacts. This work surveys the state-of-the-art of debugging in the context of DSM and proposes a mapping between debugging concepts (e.g., breakpoints, assertions) in the software and DSM realms.