Title
Comparing State- and Operation-Based Change Tracking on Models
Abstract
In recent years, models are increasingly used throughout the entire lifecycle in software development projects. In effect, the need for collaborating on these models emerged, requiring change tracking and versioning. However, many researchers have shown that existing methods and tools for Version Control (VC) do not work well on graph-like models, such as UML, SysML or domain-specific modeling languages. To alleviate this, alternative techniques and methods have been proposed which can be classified into state-based and operation-based approaches. Existing research shows advantages of operation-based over state-based approaches in selected use cases, such as conflict detection or merging. However, there are only few results available on the advantages of operation-based approaches in the most common use case of a VC system: review and understand change. In this paper, we present and discuss both approaches and their use cases. Moreover, we present the results of an empirical study to compare a state-based with an operation-based approach for the use case of reviewing and understanding change. For this study, we have mined an operation-based model repository and interviewed users to assess their understanding of randomly selected changes. Our results indicate that users better understand complex changes in the operation-based representation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/EDOC.2010.15
EDOC
Keywords
Field
DocType
state-based approach,change tracking,selected use case,use case,operation-based approach,common use case,understanding change,operation-based change tracking,complex change,operation-based representation,operation-based model repository,software configuration management,merging,versioning,software engineering,configuration management,version control system,history,unified modeling language,computational modeling,empirical study,version control,modeling,software development
Data mining,Use case,Systems engineering,Unified Modeling Language,Software configuration management,Software engineering,Computer science,Modeling language,Configuration management,Systems Modeling Language,Empirical research,Software development
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2325-6354
978-1-4244-7966-5
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.50
14
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maximilian Koegel114210.22
Markus Herrmannsdoerfer243323.43
Yang Li3242.76
Jonas Helming41239.03
Joern David5212.10