Analyzing model changes with Loupe

TY - GEN

T1 - Analyzing model changes with Loupe

AU - Popoola, Saheed

AU - Gray, Jeff

AU - Garcia-Dominguez, Antonio

AU - Kolovos, Dimitris

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 ACM.

PY - 2022/10/23

Y1 - 2022/10/23

N2 - Models are software artifacts that are subject to continuous change. The extraction and analysis of these changes may significantly affect model maintenance. Existing work has already investigated processes and techniques to support, analyze and mitigate the impact of changes to models. However, most of these works focus on the analysis of changes between two sets of models and do not take a holistic approach to the entire version history of models. Furthermore, there is limited support for constructing user-defined queries that can be used to extract change information from models. This makes it challenging to analyse the changes over the version history of the models. To support change analysis across the entire version history, we developed a change analyzer named Loupe, which can be used to query and extract change information from all versions of a model. Loupe stores the changes across successive model versions and also provides a set of language constructs to query the changes. Loupe has been compared against a generic model indexing tool (Eclipse Hawk), evaluating its capability to extract changes across two successive model versions and its capability to detect instances of a refactoring operation that has been executed across a model's history. Loupe was able to extract this information using queries that were more concise and ran faster than what could be written for Hawk.

AB - Models are software artifacts that are subject to continuous change. The extraction and analysis of these changes may significantly affect model maintenance. Existing work has already investigated processes and techniques to support, analyze and mitigate the impact of changes to models. However, most of these works focus on the analysis of changes between two sets of models and do not take a holistic approach to the entire version history of models. Furthermore, there is limited support for constructing user-defined queries that can be used to extract change information from models. This makes it challenging to analyse the changes over the version history of the models. To support change analysis across the entire version history, we developed a change analyzer named Loupe, which can be used to query and extract change information from all versions of a model. Loupe stores the changes across successive model versions and also provides a set of language constructs to query the changes. Loupe has been compared against a generic model indexing tool (Eclipse Hawk), evaluating its capability to extract changes across two successive model versions and its capability to detect instances of a refactoring operation that has been executed across a model's history. Loupe was able to extract this information using queries that were more concise and ran faster than what could be written for Hawk.

KW - change analysis

KW - model comparison

KW - model repositories

KW - query language

KW - version history

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85142929988&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3550356.3561564

DO - 10.1145/3550356.3561564

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85142929988

T3 - Proceedings - ACM/IEEE 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2022: Companion Proceedings

SP - 519

EP - 528

BT - Proceedings - ACM/IEEE 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2022

PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

T2 - 25th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2022

Y2 - 23 October 2022 through 28 October 2022

ER -