UCDiff: Difference Detection in Use Case Models of Healthcare System

Abstract

Development of large-scale healthcare software projects essentially need the efficient management of the created software artifacts during software development process. In such projects different versions of an artifact are created at different times. Traditional software configuration management systems, such as Git, Subversion (SVN), etc., are designed for later phases of software development, which mainly handle the source code document. These systems are unable to perform difference detection and version management tasks on models such as unified modeling language diagrams. UML use case model is used for capturing functional requirements at analyses phase. Different versions of the use case model are created during analyses phase. This paper addresses the detection of differences between two versions of a use case model. In order to perform difference detection, we need to perform three main tasks, i. e., extract the contents of the model, comparison of models and difference representation. Most of the existing approaches in literature of model comparison deal with UML class diagrams. To the best of our knowledge, so far no appropriate approach addresses difference computation of use case model. Existing approaches are not applicable on use case model due to different semantics of use case model. In this research, the concept of model-based software configuration management (SCM) for use case difference detection is proposed. The use case models are created in an open source tool, starUML. The proposed difference algorithm is applied on intermediate tree structure representation of models. As a case study, different versions of a patient appointment healthcare system is used to evaluate different evaluation parameters, such as accuracy, domain independence, high conceptual level and tool independence.