Research Seminar on Software Evolution

Xavier Blanc

Xavier Blanc started to work on Software Engineering in 2002 when he joined the Pierre et Marie Curie University. At that time, he participated to the Modelware project and contributed to the definition of ModelBus that was a middleware fitted to model interoperability. Next, he participated to the Modelplex project where he focused on collaborative model editing. He contributed to the definition of Praxis that is a solution for dealing with model consistency. Currently, he participated to the Movida and the Galaxy project that address respectively mutli-view modeling and distributed collaborative model editing. In september 2010, he moved to University Bordeaux 1 (France) where he is doing research on the model development life cycle at the at the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI).

Scalable Model Revision Control

Abstract of talk. Practical Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDE) requires effective support for the collaborative, incremental construction and revision of large models over long life cycles. In code-driven software engineering, such support is provided by version control systems (e.g., subversion, git, ...), all of which operate on text files. This support is adequate because programming languages provide a fixed, built-in scheme to fragment the whole source code into folders and files. In contrast, software modeling languages do not typically define any fragmentation scheme that specifies how to store the model elements and references that compose the model onto persistent artifacts. In fact, state-of-the-art modeling tools persistently store the entire model of an MDE project into a single file that follows either a proprietary file format or the verbose XMI standard. The trivial approach to provide version control for models is to interface a modeling tool with a text-based version control tool. This does not scale up because all modelers must at all time concurrently modify the same single versioned file storing the whole model. This talk presents our work in the Galaxy Project that aims at defining scalable version control for software models.