Models in Conflict

For almost four decades Version Control Systems (VCSs) have been an indispensable part for an effective software development process. VCSs store artifacts (such as files and directories) in a repository along with their evolution history. To support asynchronous collaboration between users, artifacts can be edited in parallel but the modifications must be combined into a single new version of the artifact by means of a three-way merge process. In this book, a series of open issues of state-of-the-art three-way merge approaches as part of VCSs are listed, and evaluated in terms of their supported features. Thus, concepts and techniques for a modeling environment independent, language independent, configurable, and semantically enhanced approach for effective conflict detection, in the course of a three-way merge process, is proposed. In order to validate the concepts and techniques proposed, a prototypical implementation is stated in terms of an Eclipse plugin. Finally, comparative evaluations to compare the output of the conflict detection report of the proposed approach with state-of-the-art approaches are given.