Keywords:
Astract: In model-driven software development, software models are the main artifacts used not only for supporting brainstorming, analysis, and design purposes, but also for generating executable code. Such software models are usually not created by one single developer, but within a team. To coordinate team work, versioning systems have proven to be indispensable for managing modifications performed by different modelers at the same time. When concurrently performed modifications are contradicting each other, the standard versioning paradigm requires the person who detected the conflict to resolve it immediately in order to keep the evolved artifacts in a consistent state. Whereas this approach works well in later phases of the software development process, in early phases, when the development team had not established a consolidated view on the system under development yet, the conflicts might provide valuable information on the various intentions of the modelers. This information might be lost if removed in an undocumented manner by a single modeler. We propose an alternative versioning paradigm for models, where conflicts are temporarily tolerated and discuss its technical realization for current modeling languages such as the UML. The resolution of conflicts is then not performed by one single modeler but within a team so that a consolidated version of the model is obtained.

Keywords:
Astract: As every software artifact, also software models are subject to continuous evolution. The operations applied between two successive versions of a model are crucial for understanding its evolution. Generic approaches for detecting operations a posteriori identify atomic operations, but neglect composite operations, such as refactorings, which leads to cluttered difference reports. To tackle this limitation, we present an orthogonal extension of existing atomic operation detection approaches for detecting also composite operations. Our approach searches for occurrences of composite operations within a set of detected atomic operations in a post-processing manner. One major benefit is the reuse of specifications available for executing composite operations also for detecting applications of them. We evaluate the accuracy of the approach in a real-world case study and investigate the scalability of our implementation in an experiment.

Keywords:

Keywords:
Astract: UML is a standardized modeling language that is used in many application domains. Many companies use UML within their processes, and many UML models exist in different domains. With UML, a variety of systems can be modeled, for example software systems, business processes, and production processes. Since UML is a language that is used for many application domains, the question arises how UML is used in practice. Currently, there are only a few empirical studies about the practical use of UML. None of these studies has analyzed real world models. In most cases the usage of UML has been analyzed by surveys or investigating current UML literature and UML modeling tools. Therefore, this work is devoted to the research question of how UML is used in practice and tries to answer this question by analyzing real world models. In particular, the following questions are answered: Which UML language units are used? Which UML language concepts are used? Which UML diagrams are used? Which relationships are used between UML concepts of different UML language units? Which UML profiles are used to provide additional information in UML models? To answer these questions, 92 UML models, which are publicly accessible on the Web and created with the Enterprise Architect (EA) modeling tool, were quantitatively analyzed. EA was chosen as modeling tool because it provides its own API which enables to access the content of a model with script languages such as JavaScript or Visual Basic. The results gave an insight into the usage of UML. Particularly, it could be determined which of the considered UML concepts and UML diagrams were often used and which were rarely used. Furthermore, the results showed between which UML language units more or less relationships were modeled. UML profiles were used quite commonly, but only a few different UML profileshave been used. Finally, the master thesis revealed that further evaluations concerning the usage of UML are needed to obtain more reliable data about how UML is used in practice.

Keywords:
Astract: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Model Transformations, ICMT 2013, held in Budapest, Hungary, in June 2013. The 13 full papers and 5 tool and application demonstrations were carefully selected from 58 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sections which focus on new programming models, tools and applications, evolution and synchronization, transformation engineering, and testing.