Tracing evolution changes of software artifacts through model synchronization
Igor Ivkovic, Kostas Kontogiannis · 2004
Software evolution encompasses all activities related to engineering software, from its inception to retirement. Propagating change across software models that are altered due to maintenance activities is a first step towards maintaining consistency between architectural design, and implementation models. Model synchronization techniques initially presented within the context of model driven architecture provide an instrument for achieving change trace-ability and consistency. We present a framework whereby software artifacts at different levels of abstraction such as architecture diagrams, object models, and abstract syntax trees are represented by graph-based MOF compliant models that can be synchronized using model transformations. In such a framework model dependencies are implicitly encoded using transformation rules and an equivalence relation is used to evaluate when two models become synchronized.