Consistency Maintenance Framework For Collaborative Software Modeling Tools
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Abstract:
The globalization of companies and business, and the improvements in communication and
computing have lead to the need of new models of collaborative work. Real-time
collaborative editing systems are included in the field of Computer Supported Collaborative
Work (CSCW) systems, which allow users to view and design the same document
simultaneously from geographically dispersed sites connected by networks.
Distributed Software Engineering (DSE) requires technical knowledge that spans
geographical and organizational boundaries. In a distributed environment, developers are
dispersed across different sites and even countries. Even thought major contributions have
been lately introduced to enable CSCW applications on the Internet to support global
collaboration, the area of DSE requires further research.
There are three inconsistency problems that arise in Collaborative Editing Systems:
divergence, causal ordering violation and user intentions violation. Divergence can be solved
serializing the operations at all sites, causality violation can be solved with a causal ordering
communication protocol. However user intention violation solution is dependent on
application semantics.
There are few group support framework specialized in DSE, and distributed software
modeling. However, we are not aware of any Collaborative Software Modeling Framework
using Consistency Maintenance mechanisms where the user intentions are preserved. Current
distributed software modeling frameworks address concurrency with traditional methods as
locking, turn taking, serialization, etc.
The algorithms and schemas presented in this work have been implemented in the
DArgoUML prototype system. DArgoUML is a Distributed version of ArgoUML, which
includes a Flexible Consistency Maintenance Framework based on Software Modeling
Knowledge. The Framework can be considered Flexible as it allows the system to maintain
temporal inconsistencies, as the shared document will merge to a consistent version. Some
algorithms have been devised to detect different types of conflicts based on the different level
of inconsistency they generate. Techniques have been presented to address each specific
conflict or level of Inconsistency. Besides a mechanism for conflict group awareness is
proposed, where users are aware of other user intentions when concurrent operations do
conflict.
Author: Lozano, Marta
Advisor:
Donnelly, AlexisQualification name:
Master of Science (M.Sc.)Collections:
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