Change Management in Shared Software Specifications

Abstract

In order to support the collaborative development of software specifications, there is a need to automate the extraction and integration of the parallel changes or revisions that are made to a shared specification. These revisions are aimed at reaching a specification that satisfies the needs of all the stakeholders. Hence, merging conflicts are inevitable and must be detected and resolved in order to commit the changes made properly to the shared specification leading to a consistent result. A framework is proposed in this chapter to extract and integrate the parallel changes made to Object-Oriented formal specifications in a collaborative development environment. A formal foundation is proposed to uniformly define the specifications, the revisions made to them and the possible merging conflicts. The proposed framework allows extracting and integrating the parallel changes made while addressing a wide range of merging conflicts at the same time. Evaluating the developed algorithms has shown good signs in terms of accuracy and scalability.