A Variance-Based Drift Metric for Inconsistency Estimation in Model Variant Sets

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Nowadays, iterative development has become a state-of-the-art engineering process. The shared artifacts, i.e., models, must be edited collaboratively to make iterative development work in large engineering teams. The typical non-real-time collaboration workflow consists of three phases: The collaborators create copies of the model; Each collaborator edits their variant (copy) of the model; The collaborators merge the edited models back into one. During the merge phase, conflicting changes become apparent and must be resolved. This is a time and resource-intensive task. However, if potential merge conflicts can be detected during the editing phase, the collaborators can take suitable measures in time. This work proposes an early warning system for merge conflicts in model-based development projects. We introduce the novel metric Drift to quantify the inconsistency between all co-existing variants of a model. An increase in Drift indicates an increase in potential merge conflicts. We evaluate the correctness of the Drift for synthetical modeling projects and syntactical model differences. We develop an openly available tool for calculating the Drift for arbitrary Git repositories.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-14
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of object technology
Volume23
Issue number3
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0009-0003-6829-4260/work/167217367
ORCID /0000-0003-1537-7815/work/168720068
ORCID /0000-0002-3513-6448/work/168720203

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Model Evolution, Model Metrics, Software Metrics