Highlights► Detection of applications of composite operations in evolving software models. ► Automatic generation of detection rules from executable operation specifications. ► Real-world study showing that 70% of all applied composite operations can be detected. ► Performance analysis showing that detection algorithm scales well for large models.

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Abstract. Predefined composite operations are handy for efficient modeling, e.g., for the automatic execution of refactorings, and for the introduction of patterns in existing models. Some modeling environments provide an initial set of basic refactoring operations, but hardly offer any extension points for the user. Even if extension points exist, the introduction of new composite operations requires programming skills and deep knowledge of the respective metamodel. In this paper, we introduce a method for specifying composite operations within the user's modeling language and environment of choice. The user models the composite operation by-example, which enables the semi-automatic derivation of a generic composite operation specification. This specification may be used in further modeling scenarios, like model refactoring and model versioning. We implemented the approach in the Operation Recorder and performed an evaluation by defining multiple complex refactorings for UML diagrams.

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Abstract. The employment of optimistic model versioning systems allows multiple developers of a team to work independently on their local copies of a software model. The merging process towards one consolidated version obviously turns out to be challenging when performed without any tool support. Recently, several sophisticated approaches for model merging have been presented. However, even for multi-view modeling languages like UML, which distribute the information on the system under development over different diagrams, diagrams of different views are merged independently of each other. Hence, inconsistencies between different views are likely to be introduced into the merged model. We suggest to solve this problem by exploiting information stored in one view as constraint for the computation of a consolidated version of another view. More specifically, we demonstrate how state machines can guide the integration of parallel changes performed on a sequence diagram. We give a concise formal description of this problem and suggest a translation to propositional logic.

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The usage of optimistic version control systems comes along with cumbersome and time-consuming conflict resolution in the case that the modifications of two developers are contradicting. For code as well as for any other artifact the resolution support moves hardly beyond the choices "keep mine", "keep theirs", "take all changes", or "abandon all changes".To ease the conflict resolution in the context of model versioning, we propose a recommender system which suggests automatically executable resolution patterns to the developer responsible for the conflict resolution. The lookup algorithm is based on a similarity-aware graph matching approach incorporating information from the metamodel of the used modeling language. This allows not only the retrieval of recommendations exactly matching the given conflict situation, but also the identification of similar conflict situations whose resolution patterns are adaptable to the current conflict.