Differencing and Merging of Architectural Views.pptVIP

Differencing and Merging of Architectural Views Marwan Abi-Antoun Jonathan Aldrich Nagi Nahas David Garlan Bradley Schmerl Institute for Software Research Carnegie Mellon University Software Architectures Help reason about software at abstract level Runtime organization of system Components (e.g., DataBase) Connectors (e.g., DbWrite) Properties (e.g., IsSynchronized = true) Are these two views the same? Renames Extra level of hierarchy “Move” Insertions Deletions Need for View Comparison Views evolve independently Synchronize two versions Compare two variants in product line Compare as-designed with as-built view Look for architectural violations Perform change impact analysis View Comparison Problem General graph matching NP-complete problem View comparison tradeoffs Assumptions (post-hoc vs. not) Efficiency (exponential vs. polynomial) Accuracy Ideal: detect as many changes as possible Rename, insert, delete, move, merge, split… ArchDiff: insertions and deletions, no renames Possible Assumptions Monitoring of structural edits Does not handle legacy models Requires built-in tool support Assume unique identifiers or labels Makes problem simpler IDs or Persistent Names may not exist! Heuristic-based approaches Assume majority of nodes exactly match Cannot recover information from structure Efficiency using tree algorithms Many architectural views hierarchical Hierarchy enables using tree algorithms Tree algorithms also NP-complete Assumptions produce polynomial time THP: If two nodes match, so do their parents Torsello, A., Hidovic-Rowe, D. and Pelillo, M. Polynomial-Time Metrics for Attributed Trees. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 27 (7), 2005. Detecting renames and moves Treating rename or move as insert/delete Produce structurally equivalent views But lose properties associated with elements MDIR: Detect hierarchical moves Replacing an abstraction with its contents Move = inserts/deletes in middle of the tree Constra