Abstract
Software engineering deals with the development of complex software systems which is an inherently team-based task. Therefore, version control support is needed to coordinate the teamwork and to manage parallel modifications. If conflicting modifications occur, in standard approaches the developer who detected the conflict is responsible for the conflict resolution alone and has to resolve the conflict immediately.
Especially in early project phases, when software models are typically employed for brainstorming, analysis, and design purposes, such an approach bears the danger of losing important viewpoints of different stakeholders and domain engineers, resulting in a lower quality of the overall system specification. In this paper, we propose conflict-tolerant model versioning to overcome this problem. Conflicts are marked during the merge phase and are tolerated temporarily in order to resolve them later in a collaborative setting. We illustrate the proposed approach for the standardized modeling language UML and discuss how it can be integrated in current modeling tools and version control systems.
This work has been partly funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) and FFG under grant FIT-IT-819584 and the fFORTE WIT - Women in Technology Program of the Vienna University of Technology, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bézivin, J.: On the Unification Power of Models. Journal on Software and Systems Modeling 4(2), 171–188 (2005)
Fowler, M.: UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc, Amsterdam (2003)
UML Specification 2.2, http://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.2
Altmanninger, K., Brosch, P., Kappel, G., Langer, P., Seidl, M., Wieland, K., Wimmer, M.: Why Model Versioning Research is Needed!? An Experience Report. In: Joint MoDSE-MCCM 2009 Workshop @ MoDELS 2009 (2009)
Edwards, W.K.: Flexible Conflict Detection and Management in Collaborative Applications. In: 10th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 1997), pp. 139–148. ACM, New York (1997)
Mens, T.: A State-of-the-Art Survey on Software Merging. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 28(5), 449–462 (2002)
Munson, J.P., Dewan, P.: A Flexible Object Merging Framework. In: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 1994), pp. 231–242. ACM, New York (1994)
Conradi, R., Westfechtel, B.: Version Models for Software Configuration Management. ACM Computing Surveys 30(2), 232 (1998)
Murta, L., Corrêa, C., Prudêncio, J.G., Werner, C.: Towards Odyssey-VCS 2: Improvements over a UML-based Version Control System. In: 2nd Int. Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models @ ICSE 2008. ACM, New York (2008)
Brun, C., Pierantonio, A.: Model Differences in the Eclipse Modeling Framework. UPGRADE, The European Journal for the Informatics Professional (2008)
Schneider, C., Zündorf, A., Niere, J.: CoObRA - A Small Step for Development Tools to Collaborative Environments. In: Workshop on Directions in Software Engineering Environments @ ICSE 2004 (2004)
Kögel, M.: Towards Software Configuration Management for Unified Models. In: Proc. of the 2nd Int. Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models @ ICSE 2008. ACM, New York (2008)
Nuseibeh, B., Easterbrook, S.M., Russo, A.: Making Inconsistency Respectable in Software Development. Journal of Systems and Software 58(2), 171–180 (2001)
Schwanke, R.W., Kaiser, G.E.: Living With Inconsistency in Large Systems. In: Workshop on Software Version and Configuration Control, pp. 98–118 (1988)
Balzer, R.: Tolerating Inconsistency. In: 5th Int. Software Process Workshop (ISPW 1989), pp. 41–42. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1989)
Finkelstein, A., Gabbay, D.M., Hunter, A., Kramer, J., Nuseibeh, B.: Inconsistency Handling in Multperspective Specifications. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 20(8), 569–578 (1994)
Hunter, A., Nuseibeh, B.: Managing Inconsistent Specifications: Reasoning, Analysis, and Action. ACM Trans. on Soft. Eng. and Meth. 7(4), 335–367 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Brosch, P., Langer, P., Seidl, M., Wieland, K., Wimmer, M., Kappel, G. (2010). Concurrent Modeling in Early Phases of the Software Development Life Cycle. In: Kolfschoten, G., Herrmann, T., Lukosch, S. (eds) Collaboration and Technology. CRIWG 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6257. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15714-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15714-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15713-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15714-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)