Versionierungskonzepte mit Unterstützung für Differenz- und Mischwerkzeuge

Software configuration management (SCM) is an indispensable part of high-quality software development processes. An advantage of using SCM systems is that one can create versions of a document, detect the differences between them and release systems as configuration of certain document versions. A large number of SCM systems and concepts are available, however most of them (incl. systems such as RCS, CVS and SCCS) only work with text files. Therefore SCM is a well established and common practise in the later phases of software development processes, notably during programming and maintenance. SCM is a less common practise during the early phases, i.e. analysis and design. Existing SCM systems are not well suited for the versioning, detection and visualisation of differences between documents in the early phases, because those documents are not text, but diagrams usually part of modelling languages such as the UML.
The first part of this thesis addresses the problem of versioning diagrams. The proposed versioning system is based an object management system (OMS) to store all diagrams and on an OMS-oriented tool architecture. The tool transactions of the OMS are the basis of the proposed versioning concept. All modified objects are automatically versioned inside the tool transactions. Single object versions are combined in a configuration, which forms one version of an entire document in the OMS. Design transactions provide the required versions of the documents to the tool transactions.
This versioning concept offers a different kind of team cooperation compared to the use of RCS, CVS, etc. All developers work on the same data. Thus modifications are visible to all developers working on the same document version and do not affect others. The consistency is ensured by transaction locks on object versions.
The second part of this thesis addresses the visualisation of diagram differences when working cooperatively. The computation of the differences is based on the object identifiers offered by the OMS. The proposed visualisation of the differences is independent from the used version management system but depend on the modelling language and its syntax elements. The differences are visualised by using an so called unified diagrams. This kind of diagram includes the common and the specific parts of the compared diagrams. The specific parts are highlighted using different colours.
The versioning concept and the visualisation has been prototypically implemented on the OMS H-PCTE and the tool set PISET. PISET supports Editors for UML collaboration, object, use case, class and statechart diagrams . The visualisation of UML class diagrams have also been implemented in the Fujaba CASE tool.