MATHEMATICAL ENGINEERING TECHNICAL REPORTS On-Site Synchronization of Software Artifacts

AbstractSoftware development often involves multiple artifacts, such as featuremodels, UML models and code, which are in different formats but share acertain amount of information. When users change one artifact or changeseveral artifacts simultaneously, we need to propagate these changes acrossall artifacts to ensure them consistent.Existing approaches focus on off-site synchronization, that is, manipu-lating application data on external copies. However, in many software de-velopment tools, synchronization happens “on-site”. The synchronization istightly integrated into the tool and manipulates the internal data.In this paper we propose a new approach to on-site synchronization,which takes modification operations on artifacts and produc es new modifica-tion operations to make them consistent. The synchronization is incremental,ensuring short response time. We evaluate the performance of our approachby experiments. 1 Introduction Software development often involves multiple artifacts, such as UML models, codeand abstract views of code, which are in different formats but share a certainamount of information. When users change one artifact or change several arti-facts simultaneously, we need to propagate these changes across all artifacts toensure consistency among the artifacts. This process of propagating changes iscalled synchronization [ACar].1