Proactive Detection of Higher-Order Software Design Conflicts

Bang, Jae Young; Medvidović, Nenad

doi:10.1109/wicsa.2015.15

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…A more generalized approach to inconsistency issues in software design is proposed by Bang and Medvidovic (2015). They introduce the FLAME framework which is capable of analysing the operations performed concurrently on an (architectural) model by several users and to proactively report on inconsistencies detected by different consistency checking engines.…”

Section: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies suggest that they are effective but, by-in-large, these studies focus on identification of inconsistencies only (Lindvall et al 2002;Tesoriero et al 2004) or identification and removal of inconsistencies (Bang and Medvidovic 2015;Brunet et al 2012Brunet et al , 2015Buckley et al 2015;Rosik et al 2011). In order to assess if there was literature directly targeted at practitioners' needs in the AC area, we carried out a targeted literature review of the IEEE and ACM search engines with a query search logically equivalent to Bsoftware AND architecture AND (conformance OR consistency) AND (empirical OR practice OR study).…”

Section: Practitioner Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This usually happens during software evolution (Behnamghader et al 2016;Ming et al 2015) when the software undergoes changes as a result of bug fixes and updates, but may also happen during initial implementation of the system (Garlan and Schmerl 2004). Architectural drift can hinder evolution of systems, inhibit fulfilment of the goals of the architectural design (Bang and Medvidovic 2015) and, even if recognized, can prove costly to resolve (Knodel 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Architecture consistency: State of the practice, challenges and requirements

Alí

Baker

O’Crowley³

et al. 2017

Empir Software Eng

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Architecture Consistency (AC) aims to align implemented systems with their intended architectures. Several AC approaches and tools have been proposed and empirically evaluated, suggesting favourable results. In this paper, we empirically examine the state of practice with respect to Architecture Consistency, through interviews with nineteen experienced software engineers. Our goal is to identify 1) any practises that the companies these architects work for, currently undertake to achieve AC; 2) any barriers to undertaking explicit AC approaches in these companies; 3) software development situations where practitioners perceive AC approaches would be useful, and 4) AC tool needs, as perceived by practitioners. We also assess current commercial AC tool offerings in terms of these perceived needs. The study reveals that many practitioners apply informal AC approaches as there are barriers for adopting more formal and Empir Software Eng (2018) 23:224-258 DOI 10.1007 The original version of this article was revised due to a retrospective Open Access order. Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden explicit approaches. These barriers are: 1) Difficulty in quantifying architectural inconsistency effects, and thus justifying the allocation of resources to fix them to senior management, 2) The near invisibility of architectural inconsistency to customers, 3) Practitioners' reluctance towards fixing architectural inconsistencies, and 4) Practitioners perception that huge effort is required to map the system to the architecture when using more formal AC approaches and tools. Practitioners still believe that AC would be useful in supporting several of the software development activities such as auditing, evolution and ensuring quality attributes. After reviewing several commercial tools, we posit that AC tool vendors need to work on their ability to support analysis of systems made up of different technologies, that AC tools need to enhance their capabilities with respect to artefacts such as services and meta-data, and to focus more on non-maintainability architectural concerns.

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Section: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Practitioner Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Architecture consistency: State of the practice, challenges and requirements

Alí

Baker

O’Crowley³

et al. 2017

Empir Software Eng

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“…For example, A20 [73] reports a need for further empirical studies to deeply evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, or A28 [92] has specified that the expressiveness of the approach has to be analyzed for different modeling languages. Moreover, A04 [52] reports lack of real-world models and design tasks from an actual project.…”

Section: Map Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict management techniques for model merging: a systematic mapping review

2022

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Model merging conflicts occur when different stakeholders aim to integrate their contradicting changes that are applied concurrently to update software models. We conduct an extensive systematic mapping study on conflict management techniques and relevant collaboration attributes to the versioning and merging models from 2001 to the middle of 2021. This study follows the standard guidelines within the software engineering domain. We analyzed a total of 105 articles extracted from an initial pool of more than 1800 articles to infer a taxonomy for conflict management techniques. We use this taxonomy to classify existing approaches to understand characteristics, shortcomings, and challenges on conflict management techniques in merging models. It also provides a solid foundation for future work in this area. We show that syntactic conflicts are the most studied type and that the top three popular conflict detection techniques are constraint violation, change overlapping, and pattern matching. We observe the lack of a comprehensive state-of-theart comparison between academic or industrial tools, as well as the need for real-world case studies. Finally, we show that recent trends have focused on online collaboration, where teams of stakeholders work on large-scale models.

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“…Recently, the detection of higher-order conflicts gained attention also in the context of collaborative software design, where higher-order conflicts target design models rather than source code. FLAME [4,5] is a recently defined technique for proactive detection of higher-order software design conflicts. Although targeting a different context, it would be interesting to consider the possibility to extend FLAME with a conflict detection analysis working on the model semantics, similarly to what BDCI does for the code.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

BDCI: behavioral driven conflict identification

Pastore

Mariani

Micucci

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

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Source Code Management (SCM) systems support software evolution by providing features, such as version control, branching, and conflict detection. Despite the presence of these features, support to parallel software development is often limited. SCM systems can only address a subset of the conflicts that might be introduced by developers when concurrently working on multiple parallel branches. In fact, SCM systems can detect textual conflicts, which are generated by the concurrent modification of the same program locations, but they are unable to detect higher-order conflicts, which are generated by the concurrent modification of different program locations that generate program misbehaviors once merged. Higher-order conflicts are painful to detect and expensive to fix because they might be originated by the interference of apparently unrelated changes.In this paper we present Behavioral Driven Conflict Identification (BDCI), a novel approach to conflict detection. BDCI moves the analysis of conflicts from the source code level to the level of program behavior by generating and comparing behavioral models. The analysis based on behavioral models can reveal interfering changes as soon as they are introduced in the SCM system, even if they do not introduce any textual conflict.To evaluate the effectiveness and the cost of the proposed approach, we developed BDCI f , a specific instance of BDCI dedicated to the detection of higher-order conflicts related to the functional behavior of a program. The evidence collected by analyzing multiple versions of Git and Redis suggests that BDCI f can effectively detect higher-order conflicts and report how changes might interfere. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software configuration management and version control systems; Software verification and validation; Collaboration in software development;

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Proactive Detection of Higher-Order Software Design Conflicts

Cited by 7 publications

References 31 publications

Architecture consistency: State of the practice, challenges and requirements

Architecture consistency: State of the practice, challenges and requirements

Conflict management techniques for model merging: a systematic mapping review

BDCI: behavioral driven conflict identification

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