On merging object-oriented formal specifications

Abstract

Collaborative development allows the delegation of tasks among developers, which eases the development of complex software systems. The software artifacts created because of this collaboration need to be merged at the end of a particular development activity. To achieve this, a merging approach must be able to produce results that are correct, complete and consistent. Furthermore, the merge approach must rely on a strong similarity detection technique that allows determining the similarities that exist between the different artifacts. Merging requirement specifications allows discovering and dealing with inconsistencies at an early stage which reduces both the time and effort associated with such task compared to dealing with them at later stages such as during design or deployment. This paper proposes an approach for merging Object-Oriented (OO) formal specification views of a given system. The proposed approach is redundancy-aware, and uses a heuristic matching approach to find the correspondences between the views. Finally, the approach’s performance is empirically evaluated.