Collaborative model merging

Models are important artifacts in the software development life-cycle and are often the result of a collaborative activity of multiple developers. When multiple developers modify the same model, conflicts can occur and need to be resolved by merging. Existing approaches for model merging require developers to solve all conflicts before committing. The later a developer commits the higher the probability for even more conflicts. This forces the developers to solve every conflict as soon as possible and without consulting the other developer. However, we claim that developers often need to discuss their choice of conflict resolution with another developer in case of a complex conflict, since a conflict also expresses differences in opinion about the model. In this paper we propose to allow developers to postpone a decision of a modeling conflict. We present an approach to make conflicts part of the model and represent them as first-level entities based on issue modeling from the field of Rationale Management. This facilitates the possibility for collaborative conflict resolution and merging. Furthermore, it allows for a complete batch merge instead of interactive merging, where all conflicts are added to the model and then resolved later. To substantiate our claim that developers favor to discuss complex conflicts we conducted a case study.

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