Process Model Difference Analysis for Supporting Process Evolution

Abstract

Software development processes are subject to variations in time and space, variations that can originate from learning effects, differences in application domains, or a number of other causes. Identifying and analyzing such differences is crucial for a variety of process activities, like defining and evolving process standards, or analyzing the compliance of process models to existing standards, among others. In this paper, we show why appropriately identifying, describing, and visualizing differences between process models in order to support such activities is a highly challenging task. We present scenarios that motivate the need for process model difference analysis, and describe the conceptual and technical challenges arising from them. In addition, we sketch an initial tool-based approach implementing difference analysis, and contrast it with similar existing approaches. The results from this paper constitute the requirements for our ongoing development effort, whose objectives we also describe briefly.Comment: 12 pages. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11908562_1

A Survey of Model Comparison Approaches and Applications

“…The foreseeable user work that would be required in using this framework includes having a domain expert specify the similarity weights and features of interest and also determining the optimum similarity thresholds. Soto and Munch (2006) discuss the need for ascertaining differences among software development process models and outline what such a difference system would require. They devise Delta-P (Soto, 2007), which can work with various UML process models.…”

Using model comparison to maintain model-to-standard compliance

“…It is generally inexpensive and straightforward to convert mod els to the notation. 4. Models do not lose their "personality" when moved to the notation.…”

“…This section describes the Evolyzer model comparison system, as well as its underlying DeltaProcess approach [4,5] to model comparison. The goals of DeltaProcess can be summarized as fol lows:…”

DIFFERENCING AND MERGING OF SOFTWARE DIAGRAMS - State of the Art and Challenges

“…(Kelter et al, 2005;Xing and Stroulia, 2005) rely on tool-specific document models (trees augmented with cross-references). In (Soto and Münch, 2006) diagrams are transformed into RDF. (VVU, 2007, Störrle) proposes to transform diagrams into Datalog clauses.…”

“…It is not easy to identify elements of different versions in such a way that a minimal delta is computed. Therefore, several diff and merge tools rely on unique identifiers (Ohst et al, 2003;Lindholm, 2004;Alanen and Porres, 2003;Rho and Wu, 1998;Mehra et al, 2005;Engel et al, 2006;Soto and Münch, 2006): When an element is created, it is assigned a new unique identifier. When the containing diagram is copied, the identifiers of its elements are retained.…”