Analyzing model changes with Loupe

Abstract

Models are software artifacts that are subject to continuous change. The extraction and analysis of these changes may significantly affect model maintenance. Existing work has already investigated processes and techniques to support, analyze and mitigate the impact of changes to models. However, most of these works focus on the analysis of changes between two sets of models and do not take a holistic approach to the entire version history of models. Furthermore, there is limited support for constructing user-defined queries that can be used to extract change information from models. This makes it challenging to analyse the changes over the version history of the models. To support change analysis across the entire version history, we developed a change analyzer named Loupe, which can be used to query and extract change information from all versions of a model. Loupe stores the changes across successive model versions and also provides a set of language constructs to query the changes. Loupe has been compared against a generic model indexing tool (Eclipse Hawk), evaluating its capability to extract changes across two successive model versions and its capability to detect instances of a refactoring operation that has been executed across a model's history. Loupe was able to extract this information using queries that were more concise and ran faster than what could be written for Hawk.