The lack of empirical knowledge about the effects of model composi-tion techniques on developers’ effort is the key impairment for their widespread adoption in practice. This problem applies to both existing categories of model composition techniques, i.e. specification-based (e.g. Epsilon) and heuristic-based (e.g. IBM RSA) techniques. This paper reports on a controlled experiment that investigates the effort to: (1) apply both categories of model composition techniques, and (2) detect and resolve inconsistencies in the output composed models. The techniques are investigated in 144 evolution scenarios, where 2304 compositions of elements of class diagrams were produced. Toe results suggest that: (1) the employed heuristic-based techniques require less effort to produce the intended model than the chosen specification-based technique, (2) the cor-rectness of the output composed models generated by the techniques is not sig-nificantly different, and (3) the use of manual heuristics for model composition outperforms their automated counterparts.

Software & System Modeling