Adaptable model versioning based on model transformation by demonstration

Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is evermore adopted in academia and industry. In MDE, software models constitute the central artifacts in the software engineering process.<br />Developing a large software system entails the need for a large number of collaborating developers. Unfortunately, collaborative development of models is currently not sufficiently supported. Traditional versioning systems for code fail for models, because they neglect the graph-based nature of models.<br />A few dedicated model versioning approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches suffer from four major deficiencies. First, they either support only one modeling language or, if they are generic, they do not consider important specifics of a modeling language. Second, they do not allow the specification of composite operations such as refactorings and thus, third, they neglect the importance of respecting the original intention behind composite operations for detecting conflicts and constructing a merged model. Fourth, the types of detectable conflicts is insufficient and not extensible by users.<br />To tackle these deficiencies, we present an adaptable model versioning framework, which offers out-of-the-box support for all modeling languages, but also allows to be adapted for for specific modeling languages. For easily specifying language-specific composite operations, we propose a novel technique called model transformation by demonstration. These operation specifications constitute the adaptation artifacts for enabling the detection of applications of specified composite operations. Furthermore, we introduce techniques for detecting additional types of conflicts caused by concurrently applied composite operations as well as for revealing potentially unfavorable merge results.<br />