On Merging Object-Oriented Formal Specifications

Collaborative development allows the delegation of tasks among developers, which eases thedevelopment of complex software systems. The software artifacts created because of this collaborationneed to be merged at the end of a particular development activity. To achieve this, a merging approachmust be able to produce results that are correct, complete and consistent. Furthermore, the merge approachmust rely on a strong similarity detection technique that allows determining the similarities thatexist between the different artifacts. Merging requirement specifications allows discovering and dealingwith inconsistencies at an early stage which reduces both the time and effort associated with such taskcompared to dealing with them at later stages such as during design or deployment. This paper proposesan approach for merging Object-Oriented (OO) formal specification views of a given system. The proposedapproach is redundancy-aware, and uses a heuristic matching approach to find the correspondencesbetween the views. Finally, the approach’s performance is empirically evaluated