Edvin Herac, Luciano Marchezan de Paula, Wesley Klewerton Guez Assuncao, Alexander Egyed,
"Conflict-based Change Awareness for Collaborative Model-driven Software Engineering"
, in The 20th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA 2024), Niederlande, in Journal of Object Technology, Vol. 23, Nummer 3, Seite(n) 1-14, 7-2024, ISSN: 1660-1769
Original Titel:
Conflict-based Change Awareness for Collaborative Model-driven Software Engineering
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Collaborative Model-driven Software Engineering (CoMDSE) involves multiple engineers working together on modifying domain-
specific models. This collaborative effort, however, can lead to conflicts during merges due to differing perspectives and goals
among engineers. Solutions primarily focus on resolving conflicts during merges, but these approaches can be cumbersome
and time-intensive. Thus, researchers also propose secondary strategies such as change awareness to notify engineers of
each other?s model changes mitigating conflicts before they happen. Change awareness strategies, however, often overwhelm
engineers with a bulk of change notifications, many of which are irrelevant to their immediate tasks. Additionally, they are
required to manually analyze these notifications for conflicts, which adds significant overhead, leading to decreased productivity
and increased frustration. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for conflict-based change awareness. It utilizes an
incremental growing operation tree data structure to promptly detect potential conflicts after a model change. It specifically
targets conflicts detectable through the analysis of changes in property-value-based models, such as syntactic conflicts. The
obtained results are utilized to filter corresponding change notifications, which are then sent to the engineers. This empowers
engineers to proactively identify and address conflicts before merging their work. Moreover, by filtering out irrelevant or
non-critical notifications, engineers can focus their attention on changes that are most relevant to their work, reducing cognitive
overload and improving efficiency, as demonstrated by related work. With this approach, we aim to enhance collaboration and
productivity in CoMDSE environments. We evaluate the completeness of our approach by applying it to a variety of conflict
scenarios, as defined by the EMFCompare completeness tests. We also apply our approach in a feasibility CoMDSE scenario
using Visio to test the conflict-based notifications. Lastly, we evaluate our approach?s performance evidencing that it can detect
a large number of conflicts in a reasonable time as it detected almost 20K conflicts in less than 20 seconds.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Journal:
Journal of Object Technology
Volume:
23
Number:
3
Seitenreferenz:
1-14
Erscheinungsmonat:
7
Erscheinungsjahr:
2024
ISSN:
1660-1769
Anzahl der Seiten:
14
Notiz zur Publikation:
The 20th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA 2024)
Forschungs-