by Hoa Khanh Dam, Alexander Egyed, Michael Winikoff, Alexander Reder, Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon
Abstract:
While many engineering tasks can, and should be, manageable independently, it does place a great burden on explicit collaboration needs including the need for frequent and incremental merging of artifacts that software engineers manipulate using these tools. State-of-the-art merging techniques are often limited to textual artifacts (e.g., source code) and they are unable to discover and resolve complex merging issues beyond simple conflicts. This work focuses on the merging of models where we consider not only conflicts but also arbitrary syntactic and semantic consistency issues. Consistent artifacts are merged fully automatically and only inconsistent/conflicting artifacts are brought to the users attention, together with a systematic proposal of how to resolve them. Our approach is neutral with regard to who made the changes and hence reduces the bias caused by any individual engineers limited point of view. Our approach also applies to arbitrary design or models, provided that they follow a well-defined metamodel with explicit constraints the norm nowadays. The extensive empirical evaluation suggests that our approach scales to practical settings.
Reference:
Consistent Merging of Model Versions (Hoa Khanh Dam, Alexander Egyed, Michael Winikoff, Alexander Reder, Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon), In Journal of Systems and Software, volume 112, 2016.
Bibtex Entry:
@Article{DBLP:journals/jss/DamEWRL16,
author = {Hoa Khanh Dam and Alexander Egyed and Michael Winikoff and Alexander Reder and Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon},
title = {Consistent Merging of Model Versions},
journal = {Journal of Systems and Software},
year = {2016},
volume = {112},
pages = {137--155},
abstract = {While many engineering tasks can, and should be, manageable independently,
it does place a great burden on explicit collaboration needs including
the need for frequent and incremental merging of artifacts that software
engineers manipulate using these tools. State-of-the-art merging
techniques are often limited to textual artifacts (e.g., source code)
and they are unable to discover and resolve complex merging issues
beyond simple conflicts. This work focuses on the merging of models
where we consider not only conflicts but also arbitrary syntactic
and semantic consistency issues. Consistent artifacts are merged
fully automatically and only inconsistent/conflicting artifacts are
brought to the users attention, together with a systematic proposal
of how to resolve them. Our approach is neutral with regard to who
made the changes and hence reduces the bias caused by any individual
engineers limited point of view. Our approach also applies to arbitrary
design or models, provided that they follow a well-defined metamodel
with explicit constraints the norm nowadays. The extensive empirical
evaluation suggests that our approach scales to practical settings.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, http://dblp.org},
biburl = {http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bib/journals/jss/DamEWRL16},
doi = {10.1016/j.jss.2015.06.044},
file = {:Journals\\JSS 2015 - Consistent Merging of Model Versions\\Consistent Merging of Model Versions-preprint.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {FWF P21321, FWF P25513},
timestamp = {Sun, 03 Jan 2016 12:58:13 +0100},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.06.044},
}