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Unique identification of elements in evolving software models

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Abstract

Evolving models are often managed in file-based software configuration management systems. This causes the identification problem: if the model elements are not assigned with globally unique identifiers, we cannot identify them over time. However, if such identifiers would be given, they can be misleading because the elements to which they are assigned might change completely. As a consequence, evolution becomes incomprehensible, partial transformation is hampered, and sufficient management of inter-model relationships (e.g. traceability links) is impeded. This article presents an approach to identify model elements or even complete model fragments over time. It establishes a fine-grained history representation to describe model evolution. The representation contains identification links between the elements of different model revisions allowing us to identify elements of a given revision in other revisions or variants of the model. Due to the explicit expression of model evolution, it further enables the capturing of changes that have been applied to the fine-grained elements inside a model.

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Notes

  1. Kelter and Schmidt [22] also defines a symmetric difference which denotes a set of unchanged elements and two inserting transformations. Here we only use the asymmetric definition of a difference.

  2. This can be the case if a model element has been copied so that the descendant revision contains duplicates.

  3. www.mysql.com.

  4. www.eclipse.org/uml2.

  5. www.mathworks.com/products/simulink.

  6. www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Chair of Software Engineering, TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Sven Wenzel

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Correspondence to Sven Wenzel.

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Communicated by Dr. D. Tamzalit, B. Schätz, D. Deridder and A. Pierantonio.

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Wenzel, S. Unique identification of elements in evolving software models. Softw Syst Model 13, 679–711 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-012-0311-7

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