Towards Development with Multi-version Models: Detecting Merge Conflicts and Checking Well-Formedness

Abstract

Developing complex software requires that multiple views and versions of the software can be developed in parallel and merged as supported by views and managed by version control systems. In this context, this paper considers permanent monitoring of merging and related consistency problems at the level of models and abstract syntax. The presented approach introduces multi-version models based on typed graphs that permit to store changes and multiple versions in one graph in a compact form and allow (1) to study well-formedness for all versions without the need to extract each version individually, (2) to report all possible merge conflicts without the need to merge all pairs of versions, and (3) to report all violations of well-formedness conditions that will result for merges of any two versions independent of any merge decisions without the need to merge all pairs of versions. Thereby, the approach aims to permit early and frequent conflict detection while developing in parallel. The paper defines the related concepts and algorithms operating on multi-version models, proves their correctness w.r.t. the usually employed three-way-merge, and reports on preliminary experiments concerning the scalability.