TIME - Tracking Intra- and Inter-Model Evolution

Modern software development approaches, especially the model-driven approaches, heavily rely on the use of models during the whole development process. With the increasingly integrated tools these models converge into one unified model for various artifacts from various development activities. These unified models evolve over extended periods of time, which creates an emerging demand for versioning, comparing and merging them. Current approaches for Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems are note adequate for the special requirements of these integrated models. Most of them have been designed to manage changes in textual artifacts such as source code in a file system. Consequently they operate on the abstraction of a file system and represent change in a line-oriented way. Some of them have been developed as a solution for a single tool and can therefore not provide a seamless solution for an integrated model. We propose TIME (Tracking Interand Intra-Model Evolution), a novel software configuration management approach for software engineering artifacts that is able to manage change in graph-structured artifacts and supports traceability. Our approach is based on operation-based deltas, change packages and product versioning. To demonstrate feasibility we implemented a TIME prototype in Sysiphus, a tool for collaborating over software engineering artifacts.