Tracing Model Elements

Abstract

In model-driven engineering developers work mainly or only with models, which exist in many versions. This paper presents an approach to trace single model elements or groups of elements within a version history of a model. It also offers analysis capabilities such as detection of logical coupling between model elements. The approach uses a differencing algorithm known as SiDiff to identify similar elements in different versions of a model. SiDiff is highly configurable and thus our tracing approach can be adapted to all diagram types of the UML and to a large set of domain specific languages. The approach has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in that visualizes all relevant information about the traces and it allows developers to interactively explore details. It has been evaluated by several groups of test persons; they considered most of the functions of the tool to be very useful.

Visually Summarising Software Change

“…Xing and Stroulia [46] employ the UMLDiff tool [47] for examining the evolution of software design. Similar work has been carried out by Wenzel et al [42]. The paper by Apiwattanapong et al [3] is well known for its discussion of semantic differencing and the JDiff tool.…”

Scalable visualization of model differences

“…Empirical case studies which aim at revealing standard sets of metrics and views for popular model types are an open issue. Integration of difference metrics with fine-grained software history analysis [6] is another part of ongoing work.…”

A survey of traceability in requirements engineering and model-driven development

“…The same applies to model-to-text and model-to-code transformation, as described by Oldevik and Neple [137] and Olsen and Oldevik [138]. Other methods of automatically recording traces are the approach of Mäder et al [114] based on subsequent model editing activities and the approach of Wenzel et al [197] based on model differences. Yet, as discussed in Sect.…”

“…Finally, Wenzel et al [197] describe a tool which is able to compare the version history of models, to derive traceability links, and consequently, to reconstruct the evolution steps of single model elements.…”