Effects of stability on model composition effort: an exploratory study

Abstract

Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities, e.g., evolving design models to add new features. To support these activities, developers usually rely on model composition heuristics. The problem is that the models to-be-composed usually conflict with each other in several ways and such composition heuristics might be unable to properly deal with all emerging conflicts. Hence, the composed model may bear some syntactic and semantic inconsistencies that should be resolved. As a result, the production of the intended model is an error-prone and effortconsuming task. It is often the case that developers end up examining all parts of the output composed model instead of prioritizing the most critical ones, i.e., those that are likely to be inconsistent with the intended model. Unfortunately, little is known about indicators that help developers (1) to identify which model is more likely to exhibit inconsistencies, and (2) to understand which composed models require more effort to be invested. It is often claimed that software systems remaining stable over time tends to have a lower number of defects and require less effort to be fixed than unstable systems. However, little is known about the effects of software stability in the context of model evolution when supported by composition heuristics. This paper, therefore, presents an exploratory study analyzing stability as an indiCommunicated by Prof. Lionel Briand.K. Farias (B) · A. Garcia · C. Lucena OPUS Research Group, LES, Informatics Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil e-mail: kleinner@gmail.com; kfarias@inf.puc-rio.br A. Garcia e-mail: afgarcia@inf.puc-rio.br C. Lucena e-mail: lucena@inf.puc-rio.br cator of inconsistency rate and resolution effort on model composition activities. Our findings are derived from 180 compositions performed to evolve design models of three software product lines. Our initial results, supported by statistical tests, also indicate which types of changes led to lower inconsistency rate and lower resolution effort.

Towards a quality model for model composition effort

“…The design characteristics can be also used to indicate error proneness. An example of this design characteristic is the model stability [9] [14].…”

On the impact of obliviousness and quantification on model composition effort

“…transforming M CM into M AB . As a result, compose design models is still considered a tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming task [6].…”

UML2Merge: a UML extension for model merging

“…Developers can match the input models in different ways, e.g. following a named‐based matching strategy [18] (default strategy), considering syntactic properties (partial strategy), or even considering both syntactic and semantic properties (complete strategy). To put all strategies in practice, developers may elaborate matching rules to implement and refine them.…”