Why Isn’t Model Analysis Integrated with Versioning?

Abstract

This position paper discusses the idea of integrating model analysis with configuration management systems to enforce certain quality properties of models under version control. 1. THE IDEA OF CHECKING DELTAS Large parts of software engineering is nowadays covered by modeling. Modeling is widely used for specification of software, sometimes models are interpreted at system runtime, and for some domains it is even possible to completely generate software from models. Models provide the opportunity to enhance software quality. Before the software is derived from the models, they can be checked for certain properties such as security requirements. Furthermore on model level one can easily analyze the compliance to legal or technical regulations, e.g. when auditing a business process. If the models evolve, the quality properties have to be checked over and over again for each new revision of a model. Especially in case of exhaustive analyses such as business process auditing the re-verification becomes very expensive. Hence, it would be wise to narrow down the model analysis to the portion of the model that has actually changed (i.e. the delta). Besides reducing the costs of verification, the results might become more clear since the scope of analysis is more precise and found violations are probably more comprehensive for the user. Furthermore, the reduction to delta analysis allows us to integrate the model analysis into configuration management systems (CMS) that are used for versioning the models. In that case, each new revision of a model can immediately be verified and violating states could be rejected by the versioning system.