Differencing and merging of architectural views

Differencing and merging architectural views is an important activity in software engineering. However, existing approaches are still based on restrictive assumptions, such as requiring view elements to have unique identifiers or exactly matching types, which is often not the case in many application domains. We propose an approach based on structural information. We generalize a published polynomial-time tree-to-tree correction algorithm that detects inserts, renames and deletes, into a novel algorithm that additionally detects restricted moves. Our algorithm also supports forcing and preventing matches between view elements. We incorporate the algorithm into tools to compare and merge Component-and-Connector (C&C) architectural views. We provide an empirical evaluation of the algorithm. We illustrate the tools using extended examples, and use them to detect and reconcile interesting differences between real architectural views. This article is an expanded version of the following paper: Abi-Antoun, M., Aldrich, J., Nahas, N., Schmerl, B., and Garlan, D: 2006, ‘Differencing and Merging of Architectural Views’. In: Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 47–58.