Model Evolution and Management

TL;DR

This paper reviews current techniques for managing and evolving models in complex software projects, emphasizing the need for versioning, correctness, and traceability to improve model usability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in model management and evolution, highlighting gaps and future needs.

Findings

Models require versioning and difference capturing.

Quality management for models is essential.

Evolutionary technologies are needed for models and languages.

Abstract

As complex software and systems development projects need models as an important planning, structuring and development technique, models now face issues resolved for software earlier: models need to be versioned, differences captured, syntactic and semantic correctness checked as early as possible, documented, presented in easily accessible forms, etc. Quality management needs to be established for models as well as their relationship to other models, to code and to requirement documents precisely clarified and tracked. Business and product requirements, product technologies as well as development tools evolve. This also means we need evolutionary technologies both for models within a language and if the language evolves also for an upgrade of the models. This chapter discusses the state of the art in model management and evolution and sketches what is still necessary for models to become as usable and used as software.