SMDSL: A Domain-Specific Language for Describing Software Platform Migrations

Abstract

Software platform migration involves more than executing transformations. It requires reasoning about feature mismatches, semantic changes, automation limits, and manual decisions. To address this gap, this paper introduces SMDSL, a domain-specific language for representing migration knowledge. We apply SMDSL to four migration scenarios and provide Picto-based views and a Java analyzer for visualizing, querying, and summarizing SMDSL models. The examples and discussion suggest that SMDSL makes migration knowledge explicit, traceable, and analyzable, while introducing modeling effort and requiring further empirical validation.