Why Model Versioning Research is Needed ! ? An Experience Report ?

The status of current model-driven engineering technologies has matured over the last years whereas the infrastructure supporting model management is still in its infancy. Infrastructural means include version control systems, which are successfully used for the management of textual artifacts like source code. Unfortunately, they are only limited suitable for models. Consequently, dedicated solutions emerge. These approaches are currently hard to compare, because no common quality measure has been established yet and no structured test cases are available. In this paper, we analyze the challenges coming along with merging different versions of one model and derive a first categorization of typical changes and the therefrom resulting conflicts. On this basis we create a set of test cases on which we apply state-of-the-art versioning systems and report our experiences.