Abstract

Software Configuration Management (SCM) aims to provide a controlling mechanism for software artifacts created during the software development lifecycle. Traditional SCM systems are file-centric and consider software systems as a set of text files. Today software development is model-centric. New challenges such as model diff, merge and evolution control arise while using models as central artifact, traditional systems are unable to resolve these challenges adequately. In its essence these challenges are mainly due to the inappropriate representation of models at fine-granular level by traditional systems. In this study we present a generic data model to represent model at fine-grain level. We use graph structures to represent models at fine-granular level, which is an intermediate representation based on graph theory. By transforming models into the graph structures we get several ad-vantages. Firstly, we avoid several problems associated with textual representation of models. Secondly, we can handle different types of UML diagrams. Thirdly, it can be used to develop a generic model-based SCM framework, which provides model configuration management services for any UML model.

Keywords:

Data model, file-based SCM system, fine-granular representation, model-based SCM system, model transformation, versioning,

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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