Timeline exploration of model differences in source code repositories through graphical and textual views
Alfonso de la Vega · 2024
The ability to explore the evolution of models and their metamodels depends heavily on the system used for their versioning. When models are stored in the same version-control systems used for source code (e.g. Git), developers have access to the set of commands and tools that they already use and are familiar with to inspect file and line changes over time. Nevertheless, these tools might be tedious to use or not usable at all if the textual syntax used to version the models was mainly developed for persistence (e.g. XMI for EMF models), and not for developers to directly work with. Here we present our ongoing work on a set of textual and graphical views for model differences reporting that do not depend on the persistence syntax used to version the models, and on a web-based explorer that allows visualising the evolution of models and metamodels across the commits of a remote repository.