research-article

DSMCompare: domain-specific model differencing for graphical domain-specific languages

Authors:

Manouchehr Zadahmad,

Eugene Syriani,

Juan de LaraAuthors Info & Claims

Software and Systems Modeling, Volume 21, Issue 5

Pages 2067 - 2096

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00971-1

Published: 01 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

During the development of a software project, different developers collaborate on creating and changing models. These models evolve and need to be versioned. Over the past several years, progress has been made in offering dedicated support for model versioning that improves on what is being supported by text-based version control systems. However, there is still need to understand model differences in terms of the semantics of the modeling language, and to visualize the changes using its concrete syntax. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive approach—called DSMCompare—that considers both the abstract and the concrete syntax of a domain-specific language (DSL) when expressing model differences, and which supports defining domain-specific semantics for specific difference patterns. The approach is based on the automatic extension of the DSL to enable the representation of changes and on the automatic adaptation of its graphical concrete syntax to visualize the differences. In addition, we allow for the definition of semantic differencing rules to capture recurrent domain-specific difference patterns. Since these rules can be conflicting with each other, we introduce algorithms for conflict resolution and rule scheduling. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach, we report on evaluations based on synthetic models and on version histories of models developed by third parties.

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Cited By

de la Vega ACombemale BWimmer MChechik MEgyed A(2024)Timeline exploration of model differences in source code repositories through graphical and textual viewsProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3652620.3688207(755-759)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652620.3688207

Index Terms

DSMCompare: domain-specific model differencing for graphical domain-specific languages
1. Social and professional topics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
  2. Software notations and tools

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Information

Published In

cover image Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)

Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) Volume 21, Issue 5

Oct 2022

401 pages

ISSN:1619-1366

Issue’s Table of Contents

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022.

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2022

Accepted: 12 December 2021

Revision received: 16 June 2021

Received: 05 February 2021

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Cited By

de la Vega ACombemale BWimmer MChechik MEgyed A(2024)Timeline exploration of model differences in source code repositories through graphical and textual viewsProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3652620.3688207(755-759)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652620.3688207

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